bookshelf

FROM A SEALED ROOM

Name: FROM A SEALED ROOM
Author: Rachel Kadish
ISBN: 0-399-14300-9

by Rachel Kadish ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 1998

bookshelf

A first novel sets the youthful ordeals of Maya, an idealistic and somewhat imperceptive American student at Israel’s Hebrew University, against both the historical and contemporary struggles of Western Jews. The “sealed room” of the title refers both to the gas-proofed area in Israeli homes created during the Gulf War and to Maya’s uneducated heart. Her Israeli relatives Tami and Nachum, with their soldier-son Dov and daughter Ariela, offer domestic comfort as they struggle with the reticent Dov, who has recently lost an Army buddy. Shortly after her arrival in Jerusalem, Maya moves in with Gil, a passionate artist who was discharged from the Army under a cloud. She becomes the submissive recipient of his love and of his sudden, violent rages. Meantime, a neighbor, disoriented Holocaust survivor Shifra Feldstein (something of a mystic), believes Maya to be a kind of savior and presents her with gifts and cryptic messages. Along the way, the story is occasionally interrupted by Shifra’s grief-clouded ruminations on the course of her life, though the verbal drift of her musings deprives them of much solid resonance. Maya goes camping with Dov and his friends, is beaten and raped by Gil, and receives word of her mother’s impending death from cancer. Shifra’s own sudden demise precedes Maya’s return to America, where her mother reminisces, then becomes reconciled with her daughter, in the process clarifying some of the emotions and experiences Shifra had shared with her. Maya returns to Israel, dumps Gil, and vows to try to see Israel as it really is. The portrait of Maya is compelling, and her confusions and doubts are persuasive, but comparing her experiences with dangerous boyfriends and an ill mother to the Palestinian peace talks is a stretch. The tale doesn’t need, and can't sustain, the larger geopolitical and historical implications that are added to it.

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998

ISBN: 0-399-14300-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WEIGHT OF INK
by Rachel Kadish

- BOOK REVIEW
TOLSTOY LIED
by Rachel Kadish

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.