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THE BANQUET IN BLITVA

Name: THE BANQUET IN BLITVA
Author: Miroslav Krleza
ISBN: 0-8101-1862-9

by Miroslav Krleza & translated by Edward Dennis Goy & Jasna Levinger-Goy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2003

Difficult, but much worth reading as an introduction to an unjustly neglected European master.

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A great Croatian writer is seen at his most animated and unsparing in a venomous satire (first published in 1939) on political aggrandizement and xenophobia.

Krleza (1893–1981) was a formidably accomplished novelist, poet, dramatist, translator, and editor whose vast oeuvre is only sparingly represented in English (his most highly praised novel, The Return of Philip Latinovicz, has been translated, as has a superb story collection, The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall). Blitva is about a fictional Baltic republic created after WWI as a result of the enmity between Blitvan dictator Kristian Barutanski and his former boyhood friend Niels Nielsen (“a neurotic, European-educated intellectual”), who has become the embarrassingly visible editor of an antigovernment newspaper (and, the dictator suspects, a possible sympathizer with the enemy republic of Blatvia). Though plot is secondary to the principal characters’ fulminations, Krleza does liven things up with the killing of Barutanski’s handpicked president-“elect” during the bombing of the dictator’s equestrian statue, and with a farcical parade of advisors, factotums, and enablers variously entrusted with the cultivation of the dictator’s image. The whole thing climaxes at a posh “banquet” disturbed by further violence, leaving the dictator paralyzed with fury as his worst fears are realized and the story breaks off (this translation contains only the first two of the original’s three volumes). Agenda-driven, the novel sometimes creaks under the weight of authorial commentary, but its very considerable satiric force is enlivened by Krleza’s crisp portrayals of Barutanski’s yes-men (like the Dr. Wystulanski entrusted with developing “poisonous gases” to help suppress dissent). And the dictator himself, a disciple of Renaissance polymath Giordano Bruno with the soul of a thuggish peasant, is an altogether marvelous creation.

Difficult, but much worth reading as an introduction to an unjustly neglected European master.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-8101-1862-9

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Northwestern Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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.