Though some will find that the illumination within the final three pages justifies the existential tedium preceding it,...
Rarely has a novelist pulled the strings of his puppetry more transparently, as ardent fans may find this meta-fictional fable profound, while others may dismiss it as a literary parlor trick.
With a Kafkaesque protagonist in an M.C. Escher plot, Auster (The Brooklyn Follies, 2005, etc.) returns to the themes of identity, memory, illusion and creativity that have marked his work since his breakthrough New York Trilogy (The Locked Room, 1986, etc.). During that period, he was regarded as a sort of metaphysical mystery writer, a reputation he lives up to here. The protagonist is nameless except as “the old man,” until author and reader make a compact to refer to him as “Mr. Blank,” which immediately becomes the name by which other characters know him. Those characters then invoke the names of others recycled from Auster’s fiction (Benjamin Sachs, David Zimmer, Fanshawe, Quinn), whom Mr. Blank is supposed to know but doesn’t. Except for vague memories and dreams, he knows nothing. He has been committed to or incarcerated within a room that is the totality of his environment, or perhaps he is there by choice. Everything in the room carries a label (“lamp,” “desk,” etc.), for his command of the connection between language and reality (whatever that is) is tenuous. There are photographs on the desk that might well spark clues to his identity, and a manuscript that purports to be the memoir of a previous occupant of this very room. Visitors come and go: a doctor, a former inspector, a lawyer and others, some of whom may have had some connection with Mr. Blank, none of whom he remembers and most of whom he will forget as soon as they leave. Otherwise, nothing much happens, until the novel culminates in Mr. Blank’s discovery of another manuscript with which the reader will be quite familiar.
Though some will find that the illumination within the final three pages justifies the existential tedium preceding it, others will agree with Mr. Blank, who is “not the least bit amused” and wonders, “When is this nonsense going to end?”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8145-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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