Take their word for it, then: it’s literature. For sure it’s European, and it’s of much interest to literary readers and...
Latest installment in an annual anthology, now in its sixth edition, running the continent from Austria to Wales.
What is literature? That’s the subject of Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s rather glancing preface, which mostly settles, and then arguably, on what literature is not: it’s not crime fiction; even though crime is about death and the subject of literature at its heart “is death, what it means to die,” literature is too bespoke to admit the mass market. Or something like that. The collection is silent as to the criteria for getting into it, but presumably what we have here is literature. Much of it is about death, in any event. The more pertinent question, perhaps, is: what is the difference between European and American literature? (And why no Iceland, home of ponies and Nobel Prize winners? Why no Russia?) That’s the subject for someone’s doctoral dissertation, but for the moment, suffice it to say that most American writers would not have a protagonist who was moved by the prospect of taking a bus in the morning so that he could have time “just to read Nietzsche.” For Moldovan writer Ion Buzu, by way of his story “Another Piss in Nisporeni,” though, it’s business as usual, and if the diction is a little odd to American ears (“Nyah, loser, screw off!”), the rueful story is a revelation. Just so, most American tales are not as historically and politically charged as Latvian writer Mara Zalite’s “The Major and the Candy,” a Gogol-esque yarn about a sodden encounter between the KGB and erstwhile evacuees from the Baltic. No one dies there, but the possibility is palpable. And death is in the offing, too, in Huw Lawrence’s soulful vignette of ordinary Welsh life, “Restocking,” in which one character meaningfully says, “Nobody is lying in a coffin all day, not even in the Council Tax Offices.”
Take their word for it, then: it’s literature. For sure it’s European, and it’s of much interest to literary readers and writers on this side of the pond.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-114-9
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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