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THE PRESIDENT'S ROOM

Name: THE PRESIDENT'S ROOM
Author: Ricardo Romero
ISBN: 978-1-9997227-2-2

by Ricardo Romero ; translated by Charlotte Coombe ; edited by Annie McDermott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 2020

A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst.

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Every house in the country keeps a room ready in case the president should need it. He never enters most of them, so what happens when the president does come to call and an ordinary boy from an ordinary house becomes “the boy the president visited,” singled out by an attention he cannot hope to understand?

In his first novel to be translated into English, Argentine writer Romero advances a conversation begun by Camus, Kafka, and Calvino. Every household here keeps a carefully curated room set aside in anticipation of the president’s visit. Though the poorer apartments in the city center do not adhere to this tradition, the book’s teenage narrator, an avatar of unconscious suburban affluence, assures the reader that every house “owned by people like us” keeps a room reserved or “they lose their privileges.” What these privileges are no one knows. How the custom began no one remembers. Just as no one recalls what led to this unnamed country’s banning basements in the narrator’s grandparents’ time because “terrible things used to happen before, in the basements,” and no one seems to quite know how old the president is, how long he has been in power, or anything else about him other than the size of his nose, which “looks like a potato, and…that’s why he has a moustache.” In this way, Romero weaves together the implacably known world of late childhood—a place of favorite household nooks, favorite vantages in front yard trees, uncontemplated routines that are ordered according to the mysterious reasoning of parents and teachers—with all that is impossible to know about the adult world that looms on the narrator’s horizon. Romero’s unnamed narrator is believable and affecting—filled with the bodily insouciance of his age as he shinnies up trees and pads around the house in the dark—but also afflicted with the feverish dread of the eternal questions: Why this life? Why these customs? When the president finally does come to make use of his room, the narrator is pushed out of observation and into a kind of nebulous action, coming to no definitive conclusions but placing himself in a position where enlightenment will have to find him, if only because he is standing in its way.

A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9997227-2-2

Page Count: 82

Publisher: Charco Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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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.