Ulitskaya brilliantly evokes these resilient characters, showing us the Russian soul as transformed throughout its...
A masterly novella and six stories portray the depths of the Russian character, in a third English-language appearance by this geneticist-turned-novelist (Medea and Her Children, 2002, etc.).
The Moscow-based Ulitskaya has intimate access to characters in vastly different stations of Russian society. With the same bracing élan, she describes the most elevated, aged aristocrat (like the supremely supercilious grandmother Mour, in the story “Queen of Spades,” who speaks only of the famous men she has bedded while scorning her own family, and the lowly seamstress Sonechka, for whom the love of husband and daughter offers a reprieve from her peasant mediocrity. The mean-spirited crone Mour still orders her daughter, Anna, around, correcting the record of her fabulous life with famous lovers, always demanding something “elusive and indefinable” while her daughter, a doctor and grandmother herself, palliates and humors her mother’s latest caprice. Anna’s prosperous ex-husband arrives from South Africa, bringing unheard-of riches and turning the Moscow apartment upside down, yet the mother-daughter dynamic remains fatally rooted in place. The title novella’s Sonechka, on the other hand, is lifted from her dutiful work in the library—where she experiences a kind of religious ecstasy in reading Russian literature—by marriage to an older revolutionary artist, exiled in Paris but now returned to Soviet Russia to scrounge work designing theater sets. Despite the unimaginable cold and hunger the family must endure, Sonechka is happy in love; even when her elderly husband takes up with the canny Polish girl Jasia, and finds new life painting her, Sonechka acts nobly, shining with “a quiet joy of literary perfection.” In “Zurich,” Ulitskaya yanks her reader into the brutal exigencies of modern-day Russian economics as 30-year-old Lida, highly educated, enterprising and desperate to find a way out of her no-end poverty, strategically courts a Swiss businessman, vanquishes him and triumphs as the prosperous owner of a Zurich restaurant.
Ulitskaya brilliantly evokes these resilient characters, showing us the Russian soul as transformed throughout its complicated history.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-8052-4195-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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