An unorthodox detective story—the author’s fiction debut—that uses poetry to sharpen its edge.
A young man with an unusual gift is drawn into a multifarious conspiracy.
Poet Ball uses the language of his trade to breathe life into his inspired thriller about memory, truth and the unsound constructs in which we house these ethereal concepts. His protagonist, James Sim, is an unlikely hero—and possibly an unreliable observer—who is saddled with a peculiar talent for remembering things, a condition known as mnemonics. By extension, the odd turn of events that overwhelm him over the next seven days are described with a delicious dichotomy that alternates between linguistic precision and cinematic slight-of-hand. After he witnesses a man named McHale stabbed to death, Sim cautiously investigates the murder. Soon the amateur detective confronts his only lead, a man named Estrainger, who leaps from a high window to his death. Sim postulates that the murders are connected to a rash of ritualistic suicides outside the White House; each victim was carrying dire warnings from a revolutionary with the moniker “Samedi.” For his trouble, Sim is kidnapped by McHale’s doppelganger and taken to a “verisylum,” a baffling treatment center for chronic liars. It is here that Sim finds a familiar face, Grieve (aka Lily Violet), who may or may not have a look-alike of her own. The institution’s arcane rules of discourse are staggeringly tricky. “The idea is that when many lies are told, unfettered by immediate comparison to fact, they end up comprising a kind of truth. On that truth too lies can be based,” the second McHale tells Sim. Working within this unsteady structure, Sim struggles to understand his place in the scheme and identify the “plague of deafness” that Samedi promises to deliver on an ill-mannered world. Truth and beauty are largely absent in Sim’s story, and his otherworldly adventure comes to a vivid but ambiguous end. Yet for all the novel’s twists and turns, Ball is clearly in love with language, and this uncommon adventure is an apt delivery vehicle for his own substantial gifts.
An unorthodox detective story—the author’s fiction debut—that uses poetry to sharpen its edge.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-27885-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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