A CUP OF RAGE

Name: A CUP OF RAGE
Author: Raduan Nassar
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2658-5

by Raduan Nassar ; translated by Stefan Tobler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2017

Vivid, immediate, and mostly unpleasant. Readers new to Nassar may want to begin with his simultaneously released novel...

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An affair goes sour and carnality turns to violence in reclusive Brazilian writer Nassar’s (barely) novella.

Our narrator is a well-to-do farmer, a stranger to himself. His paramour is a writer from the city, and she is a stranger to him as well—at least, as Nassar writes, “For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me.” We readers are the ones doing the observing, and it’s not pretty: the man turns fretful almost at once, his attention diverted by the fact that leafcutter ants have gnawed a hole in his hedge; the woman, much younger, wants the attention on her, but she is thinly contemptuous. Their heated contact turns physical in all the wrong ways; in just four dozen pages, Nassar charts the ugly implosion of a once-passionate affair. But more than that, he metaphorically recapitulates events in Brazil’s history, for this book was first published in 1978, when the nation was slowly emerging from a dark military dictatorship; when the young woman calls the man a fascist, she is not being hyperbolic, and when he admits that she’s not wrong, he conjures up a whole set of associations that may not be meaningful to readers outside that specifically Brazilian experience. Still, his numerous quirks and phobias—including frequent allusions to castration and his not-unfounded certainty that the insects are coming to devour him as well—require no translation. Nassar is a modernist par excellence, his onrushing style reminiscent at times of Beckett; each of the brief chapters here is made up of just a sentence or two that run for pages at a time, capturing the breathlessness of lust and rage.

Vivid, immediate, and mostly unpleasant. Readers new to Nassar may want to begin with his simultaneously released novel Ancient Tillage, which is less experimental though just as cynical.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2658-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ANCIENT TILLAGE
by Raduan Nassar ; translated by Karen C. Sherwood Sotelino

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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.