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CARNIVAL

Name: CARNIVAL
Author: Robert Antoni
ISBN: 0-8021-7005-6

by Robert Antoni ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2005

An okay story, sunk by pretensions.

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Antoni (My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 2001, etc.) turns a Hemingway classic of early-20th-century angst into a less-than-classic tale of Caribbean aimlessness.

Granted, aimlessness was also ubiquitous in The Sun Also Rises, but as immortalized in Papa’s sand-blasted, paradigm-altering sentences, it became a metaphor for postwar anomie. Antoni’s workmanlike prose is nowhere as exciting, and if his self-indulgent characters have anything to tell us about Caribbean society, it’s not easy to identify during their alcohol- and ganja-soaked sojourn at Carnival on their homeland, an unnamed West Indian island. Narrator William is white, his high-flying writer-buddy Laurence is from a poor black family, and William’s cousin Rachel seems to be Creole, so the author might have illuminated the region’s tangled race relations as Hemingway (unwittingly) did the anti-Semitism of his time. But even though William’s impotence—remember, he’s the Jake Barnes figure—apparently stems from an assault by three Rastas on him and Rachel when they were teenagers, we don’t get any sense of how this connects to the island’s larger social reality. And the carelessness that made Brett Ashley so sexy leads, in Rachel’s case, to the emasculation of the teenaged Carnival King she beds in the sand, a horrifying outcome tossed off in a newspaper account and not commented on by our supposedly sensitive narrator. There’s some decent local color in the vivid descriptions of Carnival, particularly in the flamboyant costumes and dances of the masplayers (the Caribbean dialect, untranslated throughout, is reasonably understandable). But it’s perilous to invite comparisons by opening and closing with lines that mimic Hemingway’s famous ones: “Isn’t it happy to think so?” doesn’t have the bite of “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” and “We are all a lost tribe” lacks the mythic vibe of “You are all a lost generation.” Antoni conveys the flavor of the West Indies and the neuroses of his characters, but he fails to convince us that they mean much of anything.

An okay story, sunk by pretensions.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-7005-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Black Cat/Grove

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TRINIDAD NOIR
edited by Earl Lovelace & Robert Antoni

- BOOK REVIEW
AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS
by Robert Antoni

- BOOK REVIEW
MY GRANDMOTHER’S EROTIC FOLKTALES
by Robert Antoni

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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.