Next book

THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD

Think of this book as a haunted island with spectral voices and inscrutable mysteries.

The spirit of Bob Marley dominates this novel, which evokes the rich, bottom-heavy sounds of Marley’s music.

You can’t tell the living and the dead here without a score card, and a score card would be too linear a device for this magical realist tale spun by Douglas (Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells, 2005, etc.). It’s hard to know which of the myriad narrative strands one should examine first, but we’ll start with the deaf woman named Leenah, who met and fell in love with Marley in 1977 when both were exiles from their Jamaican homeland living in London. Years later, the soul of the reggae superstar and icon of Rastafarianism is implanted into the body of a homeless man huddling in a clock tower in Kingston. The man is referred to throughout the book as a “Fall-down” or a “fallen angel,” and when Leenah, now back home, sees him on the streets, she alone recognizes him immediately as Marley, the father of her daughter, Anjahla. The clock tower itself has a past life of sorts: Centuries before, it was the site of a tree where a black slave boy was hung and was known from that time on as the “Half Way Tree.” Past and present become likewise intertwined throughout the book as such historic personages as Britain’s King Edward VII, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (referred to throughout as His Imperial Majesty or by the initials “H.I.M.”) make in-and-out appearances, sometimes to confer or get high with the reincarnated Marley in the clock tower. Douglas’ audacious, willful blend of surreal imagery, historic facts, and vividly rendered monologues from all her characters, whether Jamaican-born or not, seems at times to get away from her. Somehow, the spiraling, unwieldy mix is held together by its recurrent invocation of musical motifs borrowed from classic Caribbean pop (references to “background singers,” “dub-side chanting” and “bass-lines”) and, most of all, by the poetic fire of the author’s imagery. When at one point Leenah remembers the living Bob Marley as having “cheekbones which could balance an egg or a flame or a revolution,” it’s almost as if he’s in front of the reader, preparing to let loose a musical cry for freedom.

Think of this book as a haunted island with spectral voices and inscrutable mysteries.

Pub Date: July 31, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2786-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

Categories:
Next book

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Categories:
Next book

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

Categories:
Close Quickview