bookshelf

ISABELLE THE NAVIGATOR

Name: ISABELLE THE NAVIGATOR
Author: Luke Davies
ISBN: 0-425-18604-0

by Luke Davies ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2002

Soggy and silly.

bookshelf

Young woman adrift on a sea of sophomoric philosophy.

Australian poet and second-novelist Davies (Candy, 1998) gives marine and freshwater metaphors quite a workout in this overly poetic coming-of-ager, moving from the sun-kissed beaches of Down Under to the stormy Atlantic and pausing for a stroll beside the Seine, whose flow inevitably (though inexplicably) reminds the brooding heroine of the lover who died in a motorcycle accident. Yes, Isabelle Airly has a lot to brood about: she’s a child of the fast-and-loose ’70s, still struggling to understand the reasons for her mother’s not-exactly-clandestine affair with Uncle Dan, her husband’s brother. Perhaps that’s why she floats in and out of relationships like a commitment-phobic guppy. And perhaps her mother’s affair was the reason her gentle, introspective physician father was jailed for bilking Medicare out of thousands of dollars and later committed suicide. Isabelle figures that he felt he just wasn’t as much of a man as Dan, a hearty, nonintrospective butcher in a bloodstained work-coat. Now, with nothing much to do, 22-year-old Isabelle gets high and watches a lot of undersea documentaries that spawn (sorry) still more oceanic epiphanies, thrilling to the knowledge that there is “a moment approaching orgasm when thought and emotion are stripped of all structure and form in a change as pervasive as the chromatic thermonuclear pulse of a cuttlefish coupling.” And she does her damnedest to hit that high as often as possible in order to feel connected to the world, however briefly. She and her lover “writhe together as if liquid,” but the pleasure is apparently only fleeting. Moving on to a lesbian affair with a Portuguese merchant marine captain still doesn’t scratch her constant urge to merge, though a tacked-on epilogue catches up with her several years later, happily married and heavily pregnant with her second child and feeling as if she is moving forward on an endless sea, at the prow of a ship . . . .

Soggy and silly.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2002

ISBN: 0-425-18604-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.