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BABOON

Name: BABOON
Author: Naja Marie Aidt
ISBN: 978-1-931883-38-2

by Naja Marie Aidt ; translated by Denise Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2014

A collection whose individual pieces fascinate but whose overall effect feels diluted by repetition.

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Danish poet Aidt presents 15 short stories that glance at modern disconnectedness.

It takes some courage to open a book with a description of “an astonishing landscape,” but Aidt begins with this implicit boast, confident that her work can take readers to places they’ve never been. The characters in this “astonishing landscape” are a vacationing married couple with a child. As the story unfolds, secrets come out and an accident occurs, leading husband and wife into the ellipses of their relationship. The story—which recalls European art films like Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and Kiarostami’s Certified Copy—stuns. But the rest of the collection adopts the same elliptical style, and the result, as a whole, is fascinating, frustrating and cold. Some stories—like “Interruption,” in which a man deals with a strange woman who has inexplicably moved into his apartment, and “Wounds,” in which a visitor to a city stumbles reluctantly into a fraught friendship—are wondrous, with vast loneliness underlying each syllable. But other stories seem like mere sketches, captured moments whose blurred edges struggle to suggest something important in their absence. “This is so incredibly banal,” one character thinks, “and yet it’s so important.” Capturing the importance in banality is Aidt’s laudable aim here, and many of these stories demonstrate a poet’s interest in turning a moment over and looking at it from all sides. But lined up as these moments are, the resulting book becomes occasionally dull, with many stories turning to (or, some might say, devolving into) grotesque sexuality as a quick way to inject intrigue into the “banal.” Too bad—Aidt is a much better writer of short fiction than she often allows herself to be here.

A collection whose individual pieces fascinate but whose overall effect feels diluted by repetition.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-931883-38-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Two Lines Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN DEATH TAKES SOMETHING FROM YOU GIVE IT BACK
by Naja Marie Aidt translated by Denise Newman

- BOOK REVIEW
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS
by Naja Marie Aidt ; translated by K.E. Semmel

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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.