Read it in one sitting and find yourself more open to your own daydreams.
In this fantasy of fantasies, an imaginative boy becomes, after a time, a successful movie star.
Jacques L’Aumône, the son of a sock manufacturer, is an engineer, a loafer, a frequenter of the pictures, a dreamer. As a young man, he abandons his wife and child to join a theater troupe and pursue a string of failed romances. He is down and out in Paris before decamping to the Americas, to live among an Indigenous tribe. Eventually he reemerges as James Charity, a famous actor from the “Youessuvehh.” Queneau (1903-1976) was an erstwhile surrealist—he was, in fact, an erstwhile brother-in-law of André Breton. In this novel, he's cutting closer to the bone than the surrealists, ignoring the “dreams of sleep” that fascinated Breton in favor of daydreams. These fantasies are influenced by the motion pictures Queneau adored but maintain their own inscrutable logic. There is an internal logic in the way things repeat themselves in Jacques’ life, a regression line that traces the marks of his waking dreams. Queneau is an equal opportunity wordplayer. He writes sentences of real beauty: “He got to his feet, overflowing with dignity. He was soon stationed by the window. There he remained, motionless in the face of clouds and rooftops.” But he’s also taken by real-life language (“Shut your damn mouth, holy gawdinheaven!”) and by truly lame puns (a roast is “eaten with relish, but served with mustard”). The novel’s playfulness with language borrows from Joyce; its noir-isms and grand fantasies predict gangster rap. There is a refreshing lack of morality in the novel. Jacques’ fantasies are not condoned, and his selfishness in making some of them real is not condemned.
Read it in one sitting and find yourself more open to your own daydreams.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781681377704
Page Count: 224
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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