FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE

Name: FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
Author: Robert Bausch
ISBN: 9781620402597

by Robert Bausch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 2014

With a setting gleaming with historical accuracy and a protagonist whose voice is right out of Twain, Bausch’s novel is a...

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Bausch (Out of Season, 2005, etc.) rides into frontier America for a tale of a Civil War veteran weary of "trouble and slaughter."

Bobby Hale was a Union soldier—several times. He "skedaddled"—enlisted, took the bonus, deserted and enlisted again. Even so, Hale was in the ranks at bloody Fredericksburg and Chickamauga. Bausch’s battle descriptions flash and roar—"I shot into smoke and noise...wounded men caught fire where they lay...even now the screams keep echoing in my skull." In 1869, equipped with a Colt Dragoon, an Evans repeater rifle, and his mare, Cricket, Hale hooks onto a pioneer wagon train led by a man named Theo and his Crow scout, Big Tree, "six and a half feet tall and solid as stone." En route to Oregon, they winter in Montana. Hale and Big Tree head into the Rockies to trap, an adventure lasting years. Then a Sioux woman, who’d latched onto Hale, decides she prefers Big Tree. Hale repairs to Fort Ellis, Montana, and winters in a Conestoga wagon with widows Christine and Eveline—"Those two women give me respite from strife and struggle"—before enlisting as a scout. Bausch’s research makes real the violent period—sowbelly and hardtack, militias murdering Indians, freezing blizzards. Scouting, Hale kills White Dog, a warrior who’d earlier killed Big Tree. But White Dog was part of a peace party, and Hale deserts. On the run, Hale accidentally wounds Ink, a half-breed captive fleeing her husband. The pair stumble onto the Battle of Little Big Horn, "ground...littered with dead horses and dead soldiers and a few Indians," before trekking into the "land of the Nez Perce...where Ink is certain we can be happy, and live in peace."

With a setting gleaming with historical accuracy and a protagonist whose voice is right out of Twain, Bausch’s novel is a worthy addition to America’s Western literary canon, there to share shelf space with The Big Sky, Little Big Man and Lonesome Dove.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014

ISBN: 9781620402597

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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.