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BLACK SNOW

Name: BLACK SNOW
Author: Liu Heng
ISBN: 0-87113-530-2

by Liu Heng ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993

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A bleak tale of contemporary urban alienation—in a first US appearance for young Chinese writer Liu Heng. In a Beijing neighborhood where grimy, ill-built apartments share noisome backyard outhouses and where the local cops keep tabs on everyone, Liu Huiquan, angry and grieving for his dead adoptive mother, returns home to his empty apartment after three years in a labor camp. Abandoned in a ditch as a baby, Liu went to jail because he'd been involved in a fight. A taciturn young man, known for his loyalty and ferocity, and irrevocably affected by the circumstances of his birth, he now has few hopes for his future. His beloved adoptive mother died while he was in prison; he's shy with girls; and his best friend is serving a life sentence for murder. In the year that follows, Liu tries to make a new life for himself. He becomes a street vendor selling cheap clothes, but his loneliness and shyness draw him to a nightclub, where he falls in love with a singer, Zhao Yaqui, a commonplace woman of average beauty and talent. But the infatuated Liu follows her home each night, attends all her performances, and starts drinking. Finally, he realizes that Zhao Yaqui is quite indifferent to him, but he still can't forget her. A friend escapes from prison, and Liu, instead of reporting him to the police, hides him for a few days. The downward spiral into despair and degradation continues as he learns that a business contact of his has seduced Zhao Yaqui. Liu revisits the nightclub, where he drinks too much, and on a snowy night returning home is fatally stabbed by muggers—an ending clearly foreshadowed, and probably necessary for this relentlessly somber account of life in present-day China. Prose that tautly evokes the grim mood and setting, though Liu himself is more an idea than a reality. Still, a writer to watch.

Pub Date: April 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-87113-530-2

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GREEN RIVER DAYDREAMS
by Liu Heng & translated by Howard Goldblatt

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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.