Halfway through, this series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece.
The narrator of the third volume of Knausgaard’s epic of the everyday recalls the frustrations and curious joys of boyhood.
It’s common to see My Struggle, Knausgaard’s six-volume set of heavily autobiographical novels, compared to Proust. With some reason: Both books are bulky, highly personal and unearth deep insights from humdrum acts. But where Proust is philosophical, Knausgaard is more plainly descriptive, and part of his books’ magic is how they gather strength, snowballing small detail upon small detail until he’s captured life’s fullness in a way traditional storytelling arcs fail to. This volume centers on Karl Ove roughly from the ages of 6 to 12, and it’s masterful on a number of fronts. Most prominently, it gets at the roots of the dysfunctional relationship with his father that Knausgaard detailed in the previous two books. Karl Ove was a sensitive boy who could do little to please dad, an emotionally closed-off teacher, and though the boy was rarely physically abused (My Struggle’s provocative title has always been a touch satirical), Karl Ove’s evolution from eager to please to contemptuous feels justified, exact and natural. Knausgaard reimagines boyhood in general with similar precision; at the time, his family lived in a remote Norwegian town, and the book is filled with forest treks, games, squabbles with friends and an overall sense of an identity coming together. That’s particularly acute in the closing pages, as puberty strikes and Karl Ove fumblingly tries to understand girls. (One early victim is subject to his insistence that they break a 15-minute kissing record, and he’s befuddled when she breaks things off soon after.) Candor and fearlessness are the hallmarks of the books: Knausgaard will share anything, not for shock value or self-indulgence, but to show that plainspoken honesty gets to the heart of the human condition.
Halfway through, this series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935744-86-3
Page Count: 427
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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