Alternately engaging, embarrassing and exasperating.
A novel as odd as it is thematically ambitious reveals the source of Adolf Hitler’s evil. (The devil made him do it.)
Having assumed the voice of Jesus in an earlier novel (The Gospel According to the Son, 1997), the irrepressible Mailer here gives the darker spiritual forces their due. Narrated by a former German SS officer who ultimately reveals a number of surprising secrets—about both himself and the Hitler family—the plot encompasses the incest leading to Adolf’s conception and the first 13 years of his life. With a conversational tone that is never ponderous yet not quite comic, the narrator illuminates intimate details of Adolf’s parents’ sexual life, as well as their baby’s breast-feeding and bowel movements. It probes the sibling rivalries that result in the death of one brother (perhaps with Adolf’s complicity) and the departure of another, a wilder boy than young Adolf. It finds psychological significance in the ways that the Hitler parents relate to each child (and the way those relationships shift with new arrivals) as well as to each other. The novel also has a penchant for nicknames: “Adi” for Adolf, “Nicky” for Tsar Nicholas II (as the plot briefly abandons the Hitlers for Russia) and “Heini” for Himmler. Despite an exhaustive bibliography that indicates historical research, the narrator never claims that he is writing the secret history or the true story of the young Adolf Hitler. Instead, he maintains throughout that this work is a novel, which may be truer than the history that the narrator dismisses as “a pack of lies.” It turns out that the devil is in all sorts of details, from art to dreams to computer technology. Yet the questions persist: What is Mailer up to? Why does the narrative stop in the early teens of the future Führer? And why does Adolf keep having those inappropriate erections and ejaculations in the forest?
Alternately engaging, embarrassing and exasperating.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2007
ISBN: 0-394-53649-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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