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A FAIRY TALE

Name: A FAIRY TALE
Author: Jonas T. Bengtsson
ISBN: 978-1-59051-694-2

by Jonas T. Bengtsson ; translated by Charlotte Barslund ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2014

Is this the father’s story or the son’s? Bengtsson’s ambivalence proves fatal, yielding a broken-backed narrative.

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Dad knows best. Or does he? A boy’s unconventional upbringing skews his worldview in this Danish author’s third novel (but first U.S. publication).

Dad is upset. He’s sobbing. He is reacting to the news that a progressive Swedish politician has been murdered. This is how we first see the young father with the shoulder-length hair—through the eyes of his 6-year-old son, the narrator. (Neither father nor son is named.) The politics, the violence, the emotional vulnerability, they all presage the novel’s key moment. It’s 1986. The novel’s first and longest section follows father and son through the next three years, in dozens of short takes. Life is not easy. In Copenhagen, they are constantly moving. Dad is a jack-of-all-trades, working as a butcher, a gardener, a bouncer at a strip club, a stage manager at a failing theater, though never for very long. His son takes it all in stride, though, as kids do, and Dad is affectionate, protective and fun. He tells the boy a fairy tale, in installments; disturbingly, for the reader, it shows a paranoid streak. He encourages the boy’s talent for drawing though resists his pleas to go to school. His life lessons are unorthodox: Steal from stores if you’re in need; don’t save money, spend it. Eventually, Dad loses it. At a rally, he threatens a politician with a knife and is wrestled to the ground; his motivation goes unexplained. We move forward. In a topsy-turvy middle section, the boy is 16, living with his mother and stepfather, and is now a gifted but troubled high school student. There’s a visit to a dying grandfather, who hints darkly that he abused the boy’s dad. By 1999, he’s a profile in alienation. He has adopted a Turkish identity and has a nothing job; his only hope of salvation is his painting talent.

Is this the father’s story or the son’s? Bengtsson’s ambivalence proves fatal, yielding a broken-backed narrative.

Pub Date: March 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-59051-694-2

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY 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.