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ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS

Name: ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS
Author: Niven Govinden
ISBN: 978-0-00-758049-1

by Niven Govinden ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015

A pretentious novel designed to show off the author’s florid prose in lieu of telling a story.

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A dying artist meditates on the art of portraiture in the absence of her most famous subject: her husband.

Govinden’s (Black Bread White Beer, 2012, etc.) latest transposes his intellectual style to Middle America, where the British writer seems to have gotten bogged down in the art of imitation. This novel, about a famous artist on the edge of death who is preoccupied with the absence of a runaway husband, is an ostentatious bit of literary fiction. Our narrator is artist Anna Brown: “Born 1905. American portrait painter said to show the changing heart of the country conveyed through two life models.” Those subjects are her husband, John Brown, and their housekeeper, Vishni—although it boggles the mind why an artist would be famous for only painting portraits of her farmer husband her whole life. As the novel begins, John has inexplicably walked away to travel around looking at his wife’s portraits as some kind of self-revelatory exercise that mostly serves as the author’s excuse to examine the relationship between creator and muse. Through some kind of narrative sorcery, the mean-spirited Anna is able to explain exactly what John is up to, even as she speaks to him in a weird second-person present tense: “You will continue to sit and I will continue to paint you, because that, John, is why you are here.” Anna, meanwhile, is visited by her posh New York gallerist, Ben, who agrees to sit in as her subject in John’s absence. “I continue to look at a partially formed canvas; fragile and imprecise,” Anna tells us. “Just one untruth will ruin it: if I lie to myself, the painting will dissolve.” This highbrow novel wants badly to be the literary equivalent of an Andrew Wyeth painting but instead lands with a thud as a ghastly, plotless mess.

A pretentious novel designed to show off the author’s florid prose in lieu of telling a story.

Pub Date: March 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-00-758049-1

Page Count: 266

Publisher: The Friday Project

Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS BRUTAL HOUSE
by Niven Govinden

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARY OF A FILM
by Niven Govinden

- BOOK REVIEW
WE ARE THE NEW ROMANTICS
by Niven Govinden

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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.