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CHAMELEON

Name: CHAMELEON
Author: Mark Burnell
ISBN: 0-06-019466-9

by Mark Burnell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2001

Reams of expository dialogue punctuated by spasmodic bursts of action: more talk than thrill.

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The assassin is a woman, but aside from that it’s pretty much your granddaddy’s genre all over again.

Having escaped the clutches of her Magenta House spymasters (The Rhythm Section, 2000), lethal though lovely Stephanie Patrick is rusticating somewhere in the French countryside. She’s got an undemanding lover and the kind of sweetly pastoral life that’s gone a long way toward helping her forget she once killed people for a living. But here comes icy old Alexander, who used to run her, invading her backwater and blasting tranquility into yesterday. He’s been dispatched from Magenta House to bring Stephanie back into the fold for one last job. She’s to find and eliminate the mysterious Koba, an international terrorist who has brutally eliminated one of Magenta House’s own. And Magenta House wants payback. Make that happen, Alexander promises, and Stephanie will be struck off Magenta House rolls for all time. She takes the deal. First requisite is to scrape away the rust that rustication results in. She goes back into training, an arduous process described at great length. But at last she’s ready to pursue Koba, who is as much a professional chameleon as Stephanie herself. The hunt begins in New York, where one Konstantin Komarov proves a lot easier to find than Koba does—both a good thing and bad. Good because Stephanie falls desperately in love with the rich, romantic Russian racketeer, bad because, apparently, even the best professional assassins find it hard to be single-minded when they’re desperately in love. Magenta House, however, has no tolerance for such folderol, and Stephanie is forced to push on, leaving Konstantin to fend for himself—until, in the denouement, he plays a role that surprises him although it may not most readers.

Reams of expository dialogue punctuated by spasmodic bursts of action: more talk than thrill.

Pub Date: April 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-06-019466-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.