THE VARIATIONS

Name: THE VARIATIONS
Author: John Donatich
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9438-1

by John Donatich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2012

Donatich manages to avoid clichés in what could have been another trendy defamation of the Catholic Church, for Father...

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The title refers both to the Goldberg Variations and to “variations” in the priestly life of Father Dominic at Our Lady of Fatima.

Dominic has to adjust to the first variation after the death of his predecessor, Father Carl, a much-loved and wise old priest. Father Carl had looked out for Dolores, a troubled 16-year-old, both free-spirited and erratic, but Dominic hasn’t the light and loving touch of Father Carl, who saw Dolores as “one of God’s special cases, given us to know Him better." Dominic is instead simply bewildered by her wild, irrational outbursts. Meanwhile, Our Lady of Fatima is meeting the fate of many an aging urban Catholic church and is threatened with the wrecking ball, a move supported by the bishop but heroically (and quixotically) resisted by Dominic, who tries to drum up support through a lively blog on the Internet. Posting his thoughts and sermons online opens him up to considerable vilification, however, for he finds that there’s a great deal of hostility out there, much of it directed toward priests. Another narrative thread involves James, a talented young pianist taught by Signora Rosa, a septuagenarian piano teacher who gives her protégé cryptic, ethereal instructions in his approach to music. She persuades James to start writing a “biography” of the Goldberg Variations, a piece he feels an almost mystic attraction to. The paths of James and Dominic cross when the pianist becomes choir director at Our Lady of Fatima, and the narrative is further complicated when Dominic becomes romantically involved with Signora Rosa’s daughter Andrea, a divorcée with a 10-year-old daughter.

Donatich manages to avoid clichés in what could have been another trendy defamation of the Catholic Church, for Father Dominic emerges as a fully fleshed character, both tormented and lost.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9438-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION

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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.