HELLO TO THE CANNIBALS

Name: HELLO TO THE CANNIBALS
Author: Richard Bausch
ISBN: 0-06-019295-X

by Richard Bausch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2002

Still, Bausch’s expansive, and somewhat exhausting, ninth novel (after In the Night Season, 1998) is a bold attempt at...

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The conflicted love life and intellectual life of a woman coming to maturity in the ’90s is juxtaposed with her imagined account of the experiences of 19th-century British explorer—and author of Travels in West Africa—Mary Kingsley.

Virginian Lily Austin, daughter of two successful stage actors, drifts through college vaguely planning to act or write, eventually falling for her roommate’s charismatic half-brother Tyler Harrison, and, after their marriage, moving with him to the Mississippi home of their family, the Galatierres. Simultaneously, Lily researches the Victorian adventuress’s exploits, plans a play about Kingsley, writes “letters” to her in an ongoing journal, and dreams, as it were, the latter’s history. These Victorian materials then alternate with the lengthy processes whereby Lily discovers Tyler’s emotional and marital failings and the truth about the paternity of her baby daughter (named, inevitably, Mary), then strikes out on her own determined to become a woman as independent as her 19th-century idol. Only some of this works. The chapters focused on Mary Kingsley tell the increasingly absorbing story of a “spirited” woman who shrugs off her culture’s ideas about woman’s proper place and makes increasingly dangerous trips to the Canary Islands, Sierra Leone, and the African mainland, encountering patronizing males, locusts, hungry crocodiles, jungle fever, and worse, finally journeying further southward (and proclaiming, in a passage in Lily’s play spoken after her death, that “I came down to Cape Town, in South Africa, to die”). The problem is that Kingsley’s heroic struggles with her culture’s chauvinism and sexism do not in any credible way resemble Lily’s soap-operatic stumbling toward fulfillment. The two women’s stories thus neither mirror each other nor thematically connect, as Bausch obviously intends.

Still, Bausch’s expansive, and somewhat exhausting, ninth novel (after In the Night Season, 1998) is a bold attempt at something different, and, as such, his most interesting thus far.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002

ISBN: 0-06-019295-X

Page Count: 656

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY 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.