DARK CONSTELLATIONS

Name: DARK CONSTELLATIONS
Author: Pola Oloixarac
ISBN: 978-1-61695-923-4

by Pola Oloixarac ; translated by Roy Kesey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

This genre-defying novel blends science fiction with cyberpunk with naturalism to end up with something utterly original.

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A 19th-century naturalist describes a mysterious substance while, closer to the present day, a hacker comes of age and a government tracks its citizens.

“We have to understand these things as dark constellations,” says Max, a character in Oloixarac’s (Savage Theories, 2017) luminous new novel. The Incas, he goes on, “organized the sky in terms of the dark regions between stars, the interior shapes with bright parameters.” In this dense, dizzying book, the Argentine “Ministry of Genetics” tracks the “life trajectories” of its citizens by curating digital as well as biometric data—fingerprints, face scans. Max heads a project to help sift that data. He recruits Cassio, an old acquaintance from their rogue hacker days. Cassio is the closest thing to a main character we have. Oloixarac’s novel proceeds along three tracks; this one is the last and the most legible. Another traces Cassio’s growth from a nerdy, overweight kid to a brilliant student and phenomenal hacker. Yet another track begins in 1882, with a naturalist named Niklas Bruun, who’s conducting research on a hallucinogenic substance that appears to break down the barriers between one species and another. There isn’t exactly a plot here. Oloixarac is interested in big data, and consciousness, and the internet, and a government’s control over its citizenry. In Bruun’s sections, the prose is lushly sinuous: “The meadows dissolved at the banks of iridescent streams, and trees stood out like castles, lowering their branches only to raise them again, lines of dense liquid vegetal matter uniting the earth and sky.” When it’s Cassio’s turn, the prose lurches toward something more cerebral, even cynical (“As far as Lara was concerned, sex with Cassio would be a completely benign experience”). Oloixarac is a massive, mysterious talent; her latest novel is an oblique puzzle whose pieces never quite fit into place.

This genre-defying novel blends science fiction with cyberpunk with naturalism to end up with something utterly original.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61695-923-4

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MONA
by Pola Oloixarac ; translated by Adam Morris

- BOOK REVIEW
SAVAGE THEORIES
by Pola Oloixarac ; translated by Roy Kesey

- PROFILES
Pola Oloixarac

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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.