SALT

Name: SALT
Author: Jeremy Page
ISBN: 978-0-670-03868-8

by Jeremy Page ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 23, 2007

Ultimately, Pip realizes that Goose has exerted the strongest influence in his life, a matriarch who “battl[es] the clouds,”...

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A slowly paced debut novel in which the sights, smells and lore of the landscape of Norfolk, England, play at least as great a role as the characters who inhabit it.

Pip Langore, the first-person narrator, recounts three generations of life around the sea and marshland of eastern England. He starts with the conception of his mother under bizarre circumstances, for his grandfather was a German paratrooper (“Hans,” though called “Hands” by the locals) discovered buried neck-deep in mud in the tidal marshes. Pip’s grandmother, Goose, pulls this soldier out and takes care of him until the birth of their daughter Lil’ nine months later. Hands then literally sails away into the sunrise and is never heard from again. After Lil’ becomes a young woman, she is courted by two brothers, Shrimp and Kipper Langore. She marries Shrimp, who wants to leave his “sealife” behind, symbolized by his reversion to his given name, George. Pip, the union of this marriage, has fewer and lesser expectations than his Dickensian namesake. For many years he refuses to speak and instead inscribes his thoughts on a tablet. Only Elsie, the remote object of his affection (and avatar of Estella), succeeds in bringing out his deep need to articulate his inchoate emotional life aloud. Toward the end of the novel, Pip reviews the destruction (and occasionally self-destruction) of many of the people with whom his life has been entwined, “all of them living and losing their way on this thin strip of saltmarsh which can never be called land and never be called sea.” The characters exhibit a similar ambiguity and are never quite able to commit wholeheartedly to place, profession or each other.

Ultimately, Pip realizes that Goose has exerted the strongest influence in his life, a matriarch who “battl[es] the clouds,” preserves family stories and never gives in to “the temptation to give up.”

Pub Date: July 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-670-03868-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE COLLECTOR OF LOST THINGS
by Jeremy Page

- BOOK REVIEW
SEA CHANGE
by Jeremy Page

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.