A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak...
A robust epic of a Mitteleuropa lurching out of totalitarianism into whatever passes for modern society—“not a terrain without perils,” as one of the principal characters grimly observes.
Hungarian novelist Nádas’ stories are parallel in just the sense that Plutarch’s lives are: They draw the reader to a moralizing conclusion. Otherwise, they are parallel only for short distances, like a train line out on the Magyar Plain, leading, as many of the characters here know, to horrible places of mass death. Nádas’ long tale opens with a scene befitting Stieg Larsson (though not indebted to it in any way: Nádas has been working on this book, it’s said, since before Larsson started writing fiction): As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, a body, half-buried in snow, “half dangling off a bench,” is found in that city. The young man who found it lacks a sufficiently compelling alibi, while the police detective investigating the scene, a scholarly man with a doctorate and a classically derived sense of stoicism and gloom, suspects the worst of everyone. Who is this dead man, whose body bears “an odor that he had received during his last hours from another body”? From whose body does that sweet odor come? The detective theorizes that fetishism is involved—and indeed, Nádas’ book is as sexually fraught as anything by Kundera—while the suspect rabbits off to the countryside, opening a tale that involves dozens of characters: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, anticommunists, a Chaucerian parade of humankind, arrayed across what used to be called Central Europe. War is a constant as friends drift apart and come back together over the decades; sometimes the characters have names and addresses, other times they are nearly anonymous figures swept up in events, such as one Gypsy prisoner of war called “the man with the glasses.” Each character’s life overlaps with another’s, not always neatly. Nádas is forgiving of their many frailties (“Ilonka Weisz wasn’t hard, just a common little girl with a big mouth”), but in the end, under the rumble of artillery fire and the crush of history, all that is left of their lives—and ours—is “the ethereal shadows of poplars.”
A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak and Mann.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-22976-4
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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