CENTURIES OF JUNE

Name: CENTURIES OF JUNE
Author: Keith Donohue
ISBN: 978-0-307-45028-9

by Keith Donohue ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2011

Donohue starts the narrative by setting a challenging task—sustaining a 350-page novel that essentially takes place in a...

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A novel that is sui generis—part fantasy, part realism, part dream-vision.

Donohue starts the narrative by setting a challenging task—sustaining a 350-page novel that essentially takes place in a bathroom and bedroom. He works out the technical problem by having his narrator take a fall in the bathroom, and this tumble leads to visions, specifically a vision of eight attractive women inhabiting his bed. Each has a story to tell, and Donohue lets them speak with different voices and in different styles (appropriate because they come from different historical periods). These narrators include Jane (aka Long John Long), who as a young woman disguised herself in male clothing and escaped from her home as a cabin boy. After her ship is blown off course, she begins a long and lusty affair with several other castaways. Another narrator is Alice, who devolves into a witch and becomes deeply involved in the Salem trials in the late 17th century. We also meet the exotic Marie, whose body is covered with tattoos that reveal the story of her life. Originally a slave from Saint-Domingue, she is taken to New Orleans by her master and eventually becomes an exceptional chef. Other storytellers include Flo, who pans for gold in the 19th-century rush, and Bunny, a femme fatale right out of Raymond Chandler (or Billy Wilder). A tour de force in its mastery of styles, the book also has moments of high silliness—though toward the end Donohue weaves the threads of plot together in a surprising and affecting way.

Pub Date: May 31, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-45028-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOTION OF PUPPETS
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ANGELS OF DESTRUCTION
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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.