A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable.
Roll over, George Orwell: This post-apocalyptic dystopia makes Airstrip One look like a summer camp.
Nayler’s sophomore novel is set in a familiar future world in which totalitarian orders rule, with recognizably Putinesque touches in what’s called the (né Russian) Federation, not least an autocratic ruler who’s been running the show for decades. One of his victims is an author named Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova, exiled to the Siberian taiga after having lost an eye to the security police’s rubber bullets. “Just like in Byzantium,” she says matter-of-factly, recalling that once deposed, rulers were routinely blinded. Yet she can see well enough to sense what she thinks might be a ghost—and is, in a way, a dead woman walking: Lilia Vitalyevna Rybakova, who’s got revolution on her mind. The twist in Nayler’s neo-Orwellian world is that the rulers are now AI, part of a process called “rationalization,” and the AIs that run the (né European) Union are going haywire, raising energy prices to unaffordable levels and courting rebellion in the streets, including a Guy Fawkesian burning of Parliament: “Across Europe, power systems were failing. There had been massive data losses. No transport moved.” (We don’t hear much about the North American Union, but its tyrant has imposed a full communications quarantine: “They were intending to cut themselves off from the rest of the world.”) Lilia is in the thick of things, in trouble with the authorities everywhere but able to move around undetected, thanks to a gizmo that, she tells Zoya, “replaces you with what would be there if you were not.” All Nayler’s characters are well rounded, but the most interesting, apart from Lilia and Zoya, is the Russian bot-in-chief, Krotov—the power behind the president—who, with his algorithms constantly remade, seems destined to rule forever, forgetting, perhaps, that even Stalin couldn’t pull that off. And therein lies a twist…
A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615369
Page Count: 336
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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