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KVACHI

Name: KVACHI
Author: Mikheil Javakhishvili
ISBN: 978-1-56478-879-5

by Mikheil Javakhishvili ; translated by Donald Rayfield ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2015

A lost classic of Georgian writing, of considerable interest to students of the early Soviet era and Russian Civil War.

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A sprawling picaresque novel from the Russian periphery.

Such a venue is just the right place for a con man to flourish, and Kvachi Kvachantiradze is just the right person for the job, as if born to it. Indeed, when Kvachi came into the world, writes Georgian novelist Javakhishvili (1880-1937), he did so yelling “nothing but ‘Me–me.’ It sounds as if he’s not going to let anyone else have anything and is going to lay claim to the whole world.” In order to stake his claim on that vast target, Kvachi wheedles, cajoles, promises, lies and betrays, and somehow, as with the best con men, manages to remain more or less beloved. Moreover, he has a knack for recruiting people to take part in his ever more elaborate schemes, even if they might occasionally protest, as does this ravishing beauty: “Ah, I understand: I’ve got to pretend I’m a relative of yours? And then? What, what did you say? God, anything but that! How could I sink so low? Have I got to throw myself at that beast, at that dirty peasant?!” If the writing seems a touch fusty, that’s a product of the time and not of the translation, and underneath it all, Javakhishvili is playing a dangerous game of political criticism that comes out into the open late in the tale, when Kvachi worms his way into the confidences of the newly installed Soviet apparatus, only to take it on the lam for Turkey a step ahead of the Cheka. Javakhishvili himself was not so lucky; he disappeared into the Gulag, having written baldly of a time when “everyone was fighting everyone: Hetman Skoropadsky, Petliura, Makhno, Antonov, the Germans, the Muscovites, the French, the Poles, the White Volunteers, robbers, deserters, bandits, and marauders.” Readers without a command of those references will need to do some searching on their own, since the book is largely without footnotes, the translator rather unhelpfully pointing to Google instead.

A lost classic of Georgian writing, of considerable interest to students of the early Soviet era and Russian Civil War.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-56478-879-5

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014

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.