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AN EGYPTIAN NOVEL

Name: AN EGYPTIAN NOVEL
Author: Orly Castel-Bloom
ISBN: 978-1-94315-022-9

by Orly Castel-Bloom ; translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2017

A modern-day epic seesaws uncomfortably between absurdity and banality.

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A family saga ranges from contemporary Israel to Egypt to Inquisition-era Spain.

Vivienne leaves her job at the bank early to make it to her wedding on time. “I don’t understand,” says her supervisor, “why didn’t you take the day off?” “No need,” she says. Her husband, Charlie, is one of five Egypt-born brothers. Vita, one of those brothers, “was already married to Adele, who didn’t like the yellow part of the hard-boiled egg, and told everyone in the Egyptian garin—their cohort on the kibbutz—that she’s half-Ashkenazi.” Vivienne doesn’t understand the connection between those two details; all she knows is that, “in the dining hall Adele would always mention these facts together.” Castel-Bloom’s (Dolly City, 2010, etc.) latest novel is full of details like these: banal yet charming, mundane to the point of absurdity. Vivienne and Charlie will have two daughters, referred to only as the Older Daughter and Younger Daughter, while Adele and Vita will have one, the Only Daughter. These daughters eventually have daughters of their own. Castel-Bloom traces their lineage—based on her own—in chapters that switch back and forth in time, ranging as far back as 1492, when one small segment of the Kastil family converts to Christianity in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. Castel-Bloom has a wonderful sense of the absurd; her saga is reminiscent of both Kafka and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But her novel ultimately fails to satisfy. In many ways, the work reads more like a collection of linked stories than like a unified novel: characters and situations might be introduced in one chapter only to be dropped in the next. It might be that the balance has been tipped too far toward the banal, with chapters like “The Counter Girl Gets Leverage”—in which Vivienne’s Older Daughter, now middle-aged, becomes interested in the fate of a young convenience store worker—simply going on too long. On the other hand, you’ll want to hear more about that Inquisition.

A modern-day epic seesaws uncomfortably between absurdity and banality.

Pub Date: July 21, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-94315-022-9

Page Count: 155

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.