RESISTANCE

Name: RESISTANCE
Author: Julián Fuks
ISBN: 978-1-9998593-2-9

by Julián Fuks ; translated by Daniel Hahn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019

Though the novel operates at a curiously low boil considering the turmoil at its center, Fuks impressively inhabits the near...

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A somber contemplation of brotherhood in the context of Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970s.

This elegant, essayistic novel, the first translated into English by this Brazilian writer, is a family drama with the dramatic parts deliberately quieted. The narrator’s parents were involved in the resistance to Argentina’s junta, forced to leave the country months after adopting a baby boy, eventually resettling in São Paulo. But though the narrator recalls his father’s office being ransacked and his perpetual fear of “the crash of shoulders against the door...rough arms turning his things upside-down,” the book is less concerned with the emotions of displacement and the horrors of political violence that with the impact their exile had on the family. The narrator keeps returning to the question of where his adopted brother came from, with escalating concern that the brother’s story intersects with those of the families of the disappeared under the dictatorship. The narrator skips around his family’s chronology and moves gingerly around the questions that gnaw at him, which gives the novel’s title a dual meaning, at least; it’s a story about the impact of pushing against political power but also about the silence within families. “I can’t decide if this is a story,” he laments at one point; “I don’t really know who I’m writing to,” he says elsewhere. That uncertainty is a risky move for a novelist, and the recursive, self-questioning nature of the narrative can feel static, a feeling that's girded by the adopted brother’s being described as quiet and painfully isolated. But it’s not hard to appreciate how Fuks is trying to capture the sense of loss that comes with a life that's delivered “an infinity of small hurts.”

Though the novel operates at a curiously low boil considering the turmoil at its center, Fuks impressively inhabits the near despair that comes with the fragmentation of family and country.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9998593-2-9

Page Count: 154

Publisher: Charco Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE GOLDFINCH
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THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.