TOURMALINE

Name: TOURMALINE
Author: Joanna Scott
ISBN: 0-316-77618-1

by Joanna Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2002

A book, this time, that in manner and method is in excess of the tale it’s telling—a size-four story in a size-twelve suit.

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The talented Scott (Make Believe, 2000, etc.) makes a big story out of a small one, resulting in a novel one moment compelling, the next in longueurs.

In 1944, Murray Murdoch was one of the GIs lucky enough to be assigned to the island of Elba for a happy respite from the war (the soldiers played football on the beaches). He liked it so much (the locals gave him a piece of native blue tourmaline) that 12 years later he takes his wife and four young sons, on borrowed money, to stay for a month and look for more of the island’s reputed semi-precious gems. The family is so contented that their stay in a hillside villa goes through the autumn and even into the following year, as Murray borrows more money to buy patches of land that he hopes will be gem-bearing. But they’re not, and the tale pushes on, the boys sporting outdoors while affable Murray—who can never hold a job, drinks too much, and thought Elba was his shot at paradise—comes up with nothing after long days of prospecting. He befriends expatriate Englishman Francis Cape, a blocked writer who’s been on the island for years, hoping to write on Napoleon. The parallels that emerge between the great Napoleon and the muddling American father, Murray, fail disastrously to pull the story ahead, and the melodrama intended to help—an aristocratic local girl disappears, Murray coming under suspicion—does as much to freeze the tale as free it. The family returns to the US—and 45 years later the youngest son visits Elba to meditate on it all, recapture the past, and put the resultant gems on these pages, their tone too often far more intense than anything the reader feels.

A book, this time, that in manner and method is in excess of the tale it’s telling—a size-four story in a size-twelve suit.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2002

ISBN: 0-316-77618-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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EXCUSE ME WHILE I DISAPPEAR
by Joanna Scott

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by Joanna Scott

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DE POTTER'S GRAND TOUR
by Joanna Scott

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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.