A lot of patience is necessary to make sense of this winding narrative, but it's an eventful road.
Ajvaz (Golden Age, 2010, etc.) braids together various histories, stories, motivations, and losses while an unnamed narrator weaves through the streets of Prague.
The story truly begins with a surrealist movement in Prague back in the 1970s, but the narrator is first introduced struggling to write a novella in 1999. While taking a walk to cure his writer’s block, he steps into a web of mystery when his foot is pierced by a strange object he calls a double trident. For the rest of the day, the narrator repeatedly encounters symbols in the same shape, and then he gets a phone call from Jakub Jonás, a former literary critic whose daughter, Viola Jonásová, has been missing for two years. At Jonás’ behest and to satiate his own curiosity, the narrator spends the next eight days searching for Viola. He snakes through the city, “watchful for any opportunity, any encounter with a person unknown, any snatch of conversation overheard in the streetcar, any machine of unknown purpose, any broken-off piece of something at a dump” that might lead him to her. Ajvaz’s previous work on philosophy and his in-depth study of Jorge Luis Borges shine through. Each character bearing a relationship with the double trident has an intricate philosophy on various art forms and their roles within his or her method of whimsy. Often characters speak for entire chapters as the narrator listens, parsing the monologues for clues about the missing girl. In this convoluted novel are mosaics of characters and histories; silence and sound; art and torture. By the end of Part I, it’s hard to discern exactly what is myth and what is reality. However, the work is meticulously crafted. No tension is lost in the tangential rants of fleeting characters. As easy as it is to read through with rapt attention, this novel would definitely benefit from rereadings and re-examinations.
A lot of patience is necessary to make sense of this winding narrative, but it's an eventful road.Pub Date: March 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56478-700-2
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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