Hard to believe this glib piece of work was a Prix Goncourt finalist.
French bestseller Tuil makes her U.S. debut with a slick tale about a high-powered New York lawyer whose past catches up with him.
In Paris, where his Tunisian parents immigrated in the 1960s, his name was Samir Tahar, until constant rejections from French law firms despite his brilliant grades led him to shorten his first name to Sam and allow a prospective employer to think he was of North African Jewish, rather than Muslim, descent. Some 20 years later, Sam Tahar is a partner in an A-list Manhattan firm, married to the daughter of “one of the richest men [who's very Jewish] in the U.S.” But he’s still nursing the wounds inflicted by a torrid law school love triangle, which ended when Nina chose fellow student Samuel over Samir. So when Nina calls him (goaded by Samuel, whose motivation isn’t very convincing), Samir endangers his carefully constructed life by persuading her to move to New York as his mistress. Left disconsolate and impoverished in Paris, Samuel finally writes his big novel and becomes a literary star just as Samir’s life implodes after his half brother, François, tracks him down in Manhattan. Tuil, who has published nine novels in France, seems to intend commentary on the quicksands of modern identity, the perils of love, and the post-9/11 political situation, as Samir becomes entangled in the tentacles of the Patriot Act. What she’s written, however, is a standard page-turner, propelled by some seriously breathless prose, about a man on the make undone by his own weaknesses and capricious twists of fate. Samir and Samuel are both self-pitying whiners who treat Nina like a trophy, and it’s disturbing that a book set in the early 21st century gives its major female characters no occupations other than wife or sexual object. The tentatively hopeful ending would work better if we cared more about any of these shallow people.
Hard to believe this glib piece of work was a Prix Goncourt finalist.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7634-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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