Subversive stories in which the simplest interactions have dark preoccupations roiling underneath.
An assured collection of stories about men trying to connect with the world through convoluted, excessive means.
Their settings might be firmly rooted in the domestic, but the nine stories in Catalan writer Puntí's (Lost Luggage, 2013) collection read as though they are arriving from another world or being broadcast from a chillier, dystopian future. In "Kidney," a man named Gori gets letters reading "I'll be needing a kidney" along with checks for increasingly large amounts of money in the mail from his long-estranged brother, who perhaps feels he can buy Gori's altruism—or forgiveness. When Gori's niece shows up on his doorstep to make the request for her father in person, Gori "finally gave her the answer he's been savoring all along." Other than its preoccupation with familial dynamics, what the story has in common with those surrounding it is its use of an off-kilter premise to magnify its characters' sense of aggrievement and longing. "Blinker" chronicles a hitchhiker who refuses to make himself vulnerable to his drivers (or his readers) by revealing the contents of his black briefcase, while "Vertical" applies a Peter Pan–like sense of arrested development to a relapsed alcoholic writing his dead lover's name with his footsteps as he walks through the streets of Spain. Other stories parse obsessions borne out to their logical conclusions as characters deceive people they claim to care about for the sake of fulfilling their own desires. "Consolation Prize" focuses on a man's unhealthy fixation on the ex-girlfriend a fellow dog owner casually mentions while they're chatting at the park; he tracks her down and constructs an elaborate scenario to ask her out. "My Best Friend's Mother" places a teenager's lust in amber only to have it break out in a moment of selfishness when, as an adult, he randomly encounters the title character in a bar. Although the stories are well written and studded with wry observations, for the most part Puntí's language clears out of the way to make space for his great gifts of imagination and plot.
Subversive stories in which the simplest interactions have dark preoccupations roiling underneath.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0471-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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