A sluggish novel that gives few indications of the extraordinary work to come.
From the acclaimed Chilean novelist (1953–2003), a recently discovered 1989 novel; this enigmatic look at power though the prism of war games is on a smaller scale than the two sprawling works that secured his reputation: The Savage Detectives (2007) and 2666 (2008).
Udo Berger and his girlfriend Ingeborg, Germans in their 20s, arrive on Spain’s Costa Brava for their vacation. Life’s never been better, Udo confides in one of the diary entries that comprise the novel. War games are Udo’s passion, and he’s the German champion, a brilliant strategist moving armies across the board; he’s brought with him a World War II game, the eponymous Third Reich. (Udo’s no Nazi, despite his nostalgic love for German generals.) He and Ingeborg make friends with another German couple, Charly and Hanna; they go drinking and clubbing together. Charly is an aggressive boor who drowns while windsurfing, and a puzzling distraction from the core of the novel: the game and two unlikely opponents. Hanna and Ingeborg return to Germany; Udo has other fish to fry. He remains behind ostensibly to identify Charly’s body when it washes up (it does). But he also wants to romance the attractive hotel owner, and more importantly pursue his obsession with a mysterious, badly scarred guy known as El Quemado (the Burn Victim), who owns a pedal-boat business and sleeps on the beach. No one is sure of his background; South America? There’s even a suggestion he’s the re-incarnation of an Incan warrior. At first Udo idealizes him as a Noble Savage, but he’s plenty smart, a poetry lover. Udo teaches him the game; El Quemado catches on fast. Power shifts from the cocksure Udo to his humble opponent as the German crumbles, on the board and off. It’s an allegory, yes, but Bolaño casts around uncertainly for the best way to frame it, and juggles various endings.
A sluggish novel that gives few indications of the extraordinary work to come.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27562-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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