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ENCHANTMENTS

Name: ENCHANTMENTS
Author: Linda Ferri
ISBN: 1-4000-4069-8

by Linda Ferri & translated by John Casey with Maria Sanminiatelli ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2005

The small thrills and heartbreaks of childhood.

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A charming, weightless collection of vignettes tracking a wealthy Italian family in late-1960s Paris.

In each of two-dozen sketches, first-novelist and screenwriter Ferri (The Son’s Room) demonstrates a terrific eye for setting up a small, perfect scene to be played out through a young girl’s histrionics. Little by little, details of the narrator’s life emerge: the Italian family has moved to Paris in the wake of the father’s shadowy work (he’s a gambler and businessman, former partisan and cavalry officer, now fabulously wealthy); the mother is Italian-American, and the family occasionally visits the relatives in New York; the narrator is uncommonly attached to her younger sister, Clara, an ally against the two older brothers, and the girls attend an Italian school in Paris; the family lives in a Proustian apartment house, spending the long summer vacation in a villa in the Italian countryside. More intimately, the sketches offer touching observations of the narrator’s shifting feelings and alliances, set against the larger adult world the children understand little. The two sisters are traumatically separated into different classes at school; an aging governess is hired to care for them afternoons, showing them a life that has suffered from the “three-headed Hydra (War, Bankruptcy, Divorce)”; the narrator accompanies her mother as Lady of Charity to visit a poor Italian family and is shocked by the contrast to her father’s greedy wealth; and her first humiliation is being unable to handle her father’s wild mare, the terrible “gray czarina.” Occasionally, a reference marks the time period, as that the father met Brigitte Bardot in the Nice airport, or that Simone de Beauvoir spoke at the Champ de Mars demonstration in May 1968. Each scene holds a sweet distillation of feeling but little development, resulting in an impressionist enchantment perfect for the screen, though somewhat insubstantial for the page.

The small thrills and heartbreaks of childhood.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4069-8

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.