bookshelf

KLOTSVOG

Name: KLOTSVOG
Author: Margarita Khemlin
ISBN: 978-0-231-18237-9

by Margarita Khemlin ; translated by Lisa C. Hayden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2019

A subtle, nuanced take on one apparently selfish woman and the difficult choices she makes.

bookshelf

A woman describes her life in the Soviet Union.

Maya is a self-aggrandizing woman, not at all self-aware. She’s the narrator of Khemlin’s (The Investigator, 2015) stunning novel, and a thoroughly misleading narrator at that. But first the facts: Maya is Jewish, a teenager during World War II. She grows up in Ostyor, a small village outside Kiev. Her father dies in the war, and Maya and her mother move to Kiev. This is mostly background; in her narrative, Maya doesn’t dwell long on the war, and instead, the book gets going as she woos her first husband. By the book’s end, she’ll have had several, each one an upgrade on the last. With each transition, Maya’s living quarters get bigger. The machinations she enacts to acquire a better apartment might be confusing to readers not already familiar with Soviet housing practices. What’s clear, though, is the exquisite depth of Maya’s character. It’s easy, at first, to judge her for her materialism. But as Lara Vapnyar points out in her introduction, Maya’s childhood home was destroyed by German soldiers. Her selfishness—or what seems to be selfishness—takes on a slightly different hue when considered against the trauma she survived. But perhaps the finest aspect of this very fine novel is the language Maya uses to relate her experiences. That language is an odd blend of institutionalized jargon, Soviet cliché, and florid prose. “As a pedagogue,” she says at one point, “I worried very much about the absence of established contact.” At another point, she claims that “my soul had gradually begun begging for a holiday filled with new sensations.” The result is somehow both funny and enraging, moving and deeply felt. By the end, you’re filled with sympathy not only for all the characters that Maya has wronged, but also for Maya herself—flawed as she is.

A subtle, nuanced take on one apparently selfish woman and the difficult choices she makes.

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-231-18237-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS 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.