A scandalous artifact from an earlier age that has more mileage than one might expect from an experimental novel more than a...
An ailing iconoclast, driven to despair by his own ennui, retreats to the Pyrenees for a rest cure.
Film critic and translator Vicari (Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema, 2011, etc.) offers a distinctly modern translation of this turn-of-the-century expressionist novel by the avant-garde French novelist Mirbeau (A Chambermaid’s Diary, 1900, etc.). By using contemporary references and giving the language a florid, conversational tone, Vicari rescues the work from its own artifice and lets its arch humor breathe in a way that might not have come through in a more conventional translation. The narrator is Georges Vasseur, a cynic whose weariness with the world has saddled him with “neurasthenia,” an antiquated diagnosis that would today be likened to anxiety, depression, or neurosis. In short vignettes, Vasseur describes his days at a sanitarium high in the mountains near the Iberian border. Mirbeau uses the framework to offer pointed criticisms of the politics, culture, and social structure of the Third Republic, peppering his text with real-life figures from the age. Vasseur’s friends include Robert Hagueman, a lusty character who could just as easily occupy a Beat novel, and Clara Fistula, an adolescent transgendered genius who preaches asexuality. The novel is acidly funny, though it takes work to understand the context of some of Mirbeau’s acerbic wit. That said, some passages are timeless, like the early fragment where Vasseur adopts a hedgehog that quickly succumbs to its owner’s decadent lifestyle. “Total alcoholic inebriation. Cause of death: dropsy. An unprecedented case among hedgehogs,” writes Georges’ doctor. The novel gets to some dark places as its narrator plunges deeper into depression, but Mirbeau’s mischievous humor and keen observations about uncertainty as the cause of existential anxiety have much to offer contemporary readers who are willing to take the plunge.
A scandalous artifact from an earlier age that has more mileage than one might expect from an experimental novel more than a century old.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-030-2
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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