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.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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