WHORE

Name: WHORE
Author: Nelly Arcan
ISBN: 0-8021-7002-1

by Nelly Arcan & translated by Bruce Benderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed...

bookshelf

A seemingly interminable (in spite of its size) and sophomoric exercise in automatic writing pursuing the existential woes of a 20-year-old escort-cum-prostitute.

She calls herself Cynthia, after the dead sister she never knew back in her religious home near the Maine border, and she entertains a loathing for her bedridden, useless mother and pious, fire-and-brimstone father. Cynthia is a student in literature at McGill University in Montreal when she answers an ad for an escort service and begins servicing up to eight men a day in a discreetly provided room with bed and bath. She prefers working the daytime, like a regular nine-to-five job, and isn’t above enjoying the earlier clients, though it’s the repetition—as she reveals in her melodramatic first-person sentences that ramble on without punctuation for pages—that’s killing. French Canadian author Arcan actually describes a few of these customers, thus elevating her debut novel above the tedious, self-loathing litany of the analysand. We meet the Sabbath Blackbird, an aged Jew dressed in black, with gray sidelocks, whom Cynthia imagines as “Moses from my catechism courses and my father’s Bible . . . honoring God in whoredom” as he masturbates to her gyrations; and Jean the Hungarian, who has a withered arm and myriad scars that, as they discuss literature, they never mention. Cynthia for the most part free-associates about the hate she feels for her yellowing mother; about her father, steeped in a fear of sex that left the daughter eternally small and infantile; about obsessions with her fleeting youth and perfection (plastic surgery helps); and about dreams of death. All these she shares with her psychoanalyst, the true love of her life, though he gives nothing, not even a response.

Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed to swallow: ill-nourished fiction, overall, suggesting unconvincingly that this “caged life is the only one possible.”

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-7002-1

Page Count: 172

Publisher: Black Cat/Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

bookshelf

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.