THE ARCHIVE OF ALTERNATE ENDINGS

Name: THE ARCHIVE OF ALTERNATE ENDINGS
Author: Lindsey Drager
ISBN: 978-1-945814-82-2

by Lindsey Drager ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019

Drager’s novel, though beautiful in its conception, is frequently dense and abstract, perhaps more interested in the nature...

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This experimental novel looks at life on Earth from the 14th through the 24th centuries during sightings of Halley’s comet.

In the early 19th century, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are collecting oral folktales to include in what will become their famous fairy tales. They are startled when they learn from a woman a variant of “Hansel and Gretel”; in the version she knows, the children are cast into the woods because Hansel “loves boys.” In this tale, Jacob recognizes himself; the brothers separately wonder if it is their duty to transmit the story: “Jacob will think: What is at stake in sharing this story? And Wilhelm will think: What is at stake in leaving this story untold?” These are the questions that preoccupy Drager (The Lost Daughter Collective, 2017, etc.) in this conceptual, philosophical book. “Hansel and Gretel” becomes a motif drawn through the centuries, beginning with the actual siblings in 1378. The fairy tale symbolizes sibling relationships and difficult tenderness forged within them; it also represents storytelling itself and the power of stories to be a “safe harbor,” especially for those who have been “hurt by coded forms of hate.” In 1986, for example, a gay man dying of AIDS has given his illustrated copy of “Hansel and Gretel” to a lover, whose obituary he spots in the paper shortly after. The queer woman who did those illustrations is committed to an “Asylum for Women” in 1910. In 2211, two space probes beam out the fairy tale in binary code, still relaying their narrative despite the fact that no human is left alive to hear it.

Drager’s novel, though beautiful in its conception, is frequently dense and abstract, perhaps more interested in the nature of storytelling than in the telling of the story itself.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-945814-82-2

Page Count: 168

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE AVIAN HOURGLASS
by Lindsey Drager

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THE LOST DAUGHTER COLLECTIVE
by Lindsey Drager

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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.