Not much happens in these elegantly written pages, but the atmospherics are perfect: a brilliant evocation of place, memory,...
In his fourth novel, first published in 1975, Nobel Prize–winning French writer Modiano develops his now-trademark demimonde of secrets kept and personae doffed and donned.
The time is 1960, the setting a small resort town alongside an alpine lake somewhere within easy distance of the Franco-Swiss border. Hovering on the horizon is the dark cloud of the Algerian War. An 18-year-old boy has come to that town from Paris: “A disagreeable, police-heavy atmosphere prevailed there. Far too many roundups for my taste. Exploding bombs.” The choice of venue is deliberate, for in this little town the protagonist can idle the days away without drawing any unnecessary attention—and if attention does center on him, he can slip away across the lake. “I didn’t yet know,” he says meaningfully, “that Switzerland doesn’t exist.” Given to gloom and panic, he takes on an improbable pseudonym but keeps to himself, walling himself off in the mountains. Yet—well, cherchez la femme, and la femme will turn up, this time in the form of the beautiful Yvonne Jacquet, who lives a luxurious life of villas, Great Danes, and sports cars between film auditions. “You understand, she’s here incognito,” hisses her companion, a so-called doctor elegant of scarf and cigarette—and a man who himself has a lot to hide. (He often boasts that he has practiced medicine in Switzerland, at which our protagonist thinks, “each time I felt like asking him, ‘What kind of medicine?’ ") One theory of hiding successfully, the reader supposes, might be to surround oneself with people with even greater reasons to keep a low profile, but for all that, these people live as if their lives depended on being recognized—typically mysterious Modiano behavior, in other words, with shades of Giorgio Bassani and Graham Greene.
Not much happens in these elegantly written pages, but the atmospherics are perfect: a brilliant evocation of place, memory, and loss, shot through with an aching nostalgia.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-767-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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