by Marcel Beyer & translated by Breon Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2005
A bit labored and opaque, but atmospheric, increasingly engrossing and ultimately very rewarding.
The metaphor of espionage is put to good effect, in an intricate tale by German author Beyer.
The unnamed narrator here pieces together the complex history of his estranged grandfather’s life as part of a “game” he shares with the three cousins (actually, this only child’s de facto siblings) he grew up with in a small German village. Recurring flashbacks tell of a girl who forged a career as an opera singer, attracting the attention of a former childhood friend, who in 1936 flew secret Luftwaffe missions in support of besieged royalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. What the cousins learn—or think they learn—decades later is that their bereaved grandfather (the aforementioned pilot) took a second wife: a choleric “Old Lady” who undertook to destroy all her husband’s memories of his first wife and prevent any communication among him, his children and their children (i.e., the cousins). All this, and much more (including the real nature of their grandfather’s loss and grief), becomes clear only very gradually, as Beyer (The Karnau Tapes, 1997) circles around his story’s hidden core, moving backward and forward in several time periods and from one to another of his characters’ viewpoints. The children who seek to recover their own history thus become “spies” observing and speculating about their elders—as were the latter themselves, in circumstances shaped by both the wars of the 1930s and ’40s and by the exigencies of two destroyed marriages. Several recurring images (a peephole, a camera eye, “spores” floating in the air, a ceramic figure of a Spanish dancer, a model airplane, numerous mysterious family photographs) become clues to the mysteries that challenge the cousins—and the reader—until the story’s (quite nicely handled) climactic revelations.
A bit labored and opaque, but atmospheric, increasingly engrossing and ultimately very rewarding.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100859-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
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
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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