CITY OF GHOSTS

Name: CITY OF GHOSTS
Author: Johanna Stoberock
ISBN: 0-393-05172-2

by Johanna Stoberock ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Spirited and fresh-faced, a decent debut marred a bit by heavy breathing (“Did I say his eyes were blue? They were like a...

bookshelf

First outing about a young woman’s bittersweet marriage to a tour guide.

Isabel Grady grew up on Cape Cod, where the men are silent but not often mysterious.So, naturally, when she moved to Manhattan to room with childhood friend Anna, she was unprepared for someone like Anna’s boyfriend Danny. A trekking guide, Danny lives most of the year in Nepal, leading tourist expeditions through the mountain passes. Anna is still in mourning for her brother Matthew when she meets Danny, and being in love helps take her mind off the nightmare of Matthew’s tragic death. Unfortunately for Anna, Isabel (who’d been in love with Matthew) also needs to forget a few things, and while Anna is out of town, she and Danny become lovers. Eventually, they marry and move to Kathmandu, where Danny organizes his expeditions and Isabel helps manage a crafts shop. Danny introduces her to the expatriate community, and she soon becomes a good friend of Bethany Andrews, who teaches at the American School. Bethany’s husband Greg, also a teacher, runs a small side-business exporting Nepalese artifacts to the US and Europe. During the long periods when Danny is off on his treks, Isabel spends more and more time at the shop, being gradually brought into Greg’s exporting enterprise—which isn’t strictly run according to the letter of the law. Just when Isabel begins to worry about some of the characters she’s dealing with in her business, a personal problem overshadows her commercial concerns: Anna has come to Kathmandu. Worse, she’s going on an expedition with Danny. Is there more here than meets the eye? Just to be sure, Isabel insists (very much against Danny’s wishes) on accompanying them. Is it possible to run halfway across the world with a man only to lose him?

Spirited and fresh-faced, a decent debut marred a bit by heavy breathing (“Did I say his eyes were blue? They were like a September sky”).

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-393-05172-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

bookshelf

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.