THE MAN IN A HURRY

Name: THE MAN IN A HURRY
Author: Paul Morand
ISBN: 978-178227-097-3

by Paul Morand ; translated by Euan Cameron ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2015

A compulsive traveler himself, Morand may have found this vicarious exercise in unfettered movement an amusing way to pass...

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Sometime after World War I in France, a compulsively restless antiquarian plies his trade, marries, and contemplates fatherhood in this modern fable.

In a long and sometimes-controversial life, the French author Morand (Venices, 1971, etc.) married a Romanian princess, befriended Proust, was translated by Pound, wrote many fiction and nonfiction books, and collaborated with the Vichy regime. A hint of his apparent anti-Semitism creeps briefly into this novel, which he wrote in 1940-41 in the early months of the Petain government. Its first scene says much about the rest, as 35-year-old Pierre Niox rushes into a tavern and is so intensely impatient for service that he charges to the bar and grabs a glass and bottle himself. Observing him by chance is Dr. Zachary Regencrantz, a German psychologist with whom he discusses his compulsive haste. Thereafter, commonplace actions and leisurely analyses by Pierre and Morand will accompany the overstated theme of haste through a chronological assemblage of events in a year or so of Pierre’s life. He buys an old chapel in the south of France and while renovating it, discovers a Roman cloister, which he eventually sells, as well as a slow-moving mother and three daughters, one of whom he marries. Along the way, his hurrying costs him a butler and close friend, but he scarcely has time for regrets about either. The translation’s prose is refined and worldly, the atmosphere European, the overall effect that of a jeu d’esprit. Where the book rises above that is in the depiction of the minimatriarchy Pierre marries into. The four women’s curious behavior recalls moments in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels and Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides.

A compulsive traveler himself, Morand may have found this vicarious exercise in unfettered movement an amusing way to pass the time amid the constraints of war and occupation, but it’s not an easily shared pleasure.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-178227-097-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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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.