It’s no secret by now that Crace is one of England’s finest. His prose is rich yet lean as he dives into life’s chaos,...
Surveying the great dance of sex and procreation, Crace’s erotically charged eighth zeroes in on one freakishly fertile individual: another dazzling, imaginative feast from this British author.
Sooner or later, Lix Dern will impregnate every woman he makes love to. Fortunately, he’s not promiscuous; between 1979 and 2002, the tally is five women and six children. His encounters take place in the ancient City of Kisses in an unnamed country in Europe, though an overbearing military and a streak of sensuality lend it a South American flavor. Wittily, Crace (The Devil’s Larder, 2001, etc.) subverts the randomness of sperm-meets-egg to highlight the randomness and intrigue that precede any human coupling, foreplay’s uncertain path to arousal. Take Lix’s first time. The 20-year-old student actor has been using binoculars to spy on an older woman at a sidewalk café. The woman, aware of the spy and tired of mistreatment by cheating husbands, initiates a quickie in Lix’s pad. The two will never meet again, but Lix has sired his firstborn in an episode that also illustrates Lix’s main character trait: timidity. His one moment of courage comes when he makes a successful play for Firebrand Freda, the campus beauty, though Freda ends the affair abruptly and will bar Lix from contact with their offspring. Now alarmed by his reproductive powers, Lix goes seven years without sex, then marries Freda’s campus rival, Alicja. By now Lix is a star of stage and screen, and Alicja a successful politician; they produce two boys before the marriage disintegrates. Another sexual drought, another unplanned wham-bam (and a baby, you bet), and Lix marries Freda’s cousin Mouetta. It’s their second anniversary, and Lix is hell-bent on consummation, though there are riots and roadblocks and Lix shockingly betrays a student activist, all for six minutes of bliss in their illegally parked car.
It’s no secret by now that Crace is one of England’s finest. His prose is rich yet lean as he dives into life’s chaos, surfacing, every time, with the mot juste.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-22730-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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