A malodorous turkey. Corelli’s Mandolin it ain’t.
The popular British author who seems to alternate ambitious blockbusters (Birds Without Wings, 2005, etc.) with wispy makeweight fictions (e.g., the wafer-thin Red Dog) tests his devoted readership’s patience again.
This time we’re treated to a dual narrative shared by Chris, a middle-age English widower ostensibly mourning the death of his sexually unresponsive wife (“a Great White Loaf”), and the exotic girl, Roza, whom he impulsively picks up, mistaking her for a prostitute. Chris is Alan Bates, timidly hoping Anthony Quinn’s ebullient Zorba the Greek will teach him to shed propriety and learn to dance (so to speak). Roza, who perhaps actually is the Bulgarian Serb that she intermittently claims to be, is a gifted liar, and the sexually stunning life force of Chris’s wildest dreams. They continue to meet, usually in the dilapidated apartment building Roza shares with several countercultural types (e.g., their very own BDU: Bob Dylan Upstairs). Roza regales the lovestruck Chris with fiery tales of her (mostly erotic) experiences, including an incestuous romp with her father, a devout follower of strongman Marshall Tito. Many of this painstakingly attenuated book’s brief chapters are vehicles for canned information about the sufferings of Eastern European minority populations during times of political interest, and hence of inevitable interest. But everything eventually comes back to Roza’s grandiose self-dramatizations, and it becomes impossible to take it, or her, seriously when we’re frequently subjected to brain-dead, space-filling chapter titles (“Can You Fall in Love if You’ve Been Castrated?”) and the kind of sonorous sentimentality that belongs in a zero-budget film noir (e.g., “Even inside every damn fucked-up woman there’s some sweet little girl”).
A malodorous turkey. Corelli’s Mandolin it ain’t.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26887-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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