A beautifully crafted second novel from Booker finalist and Sri Lankan—born Gunesekera (Reef, 1995) tells of two warring families in contemporary Sri Lanka. Like the reluctant confession of a wayward spouse, the truth of the tale here is learned incrementally, teased out by inference and gradual revelation. Nor are there any stunning denouements—only a pervasive sadness as two accomplished families, like Sri Lanka’s two real-life warring factions, continue harming each other. The story of the feuding Ducal and Vatunas families is narrated by Chip, himself a Sri Lankan who immigrated in 1975 to London (where he lived in Pearl Ducal’s apartment). A year after Pearl’s death, Chip, in Sri Lanka on business, is anxious to catch up with Pearl’s son Prins, whom he suspects has gone into hiding for fear of his life. Cutting back first to the previous year, when Prins flew to London for his mother’s funeral, Chip continues afterward moving back and forth through time and place as he tells what he learned or intuited of a story beginning back in the 1930s, when Pearl married Jason Ducal. Jason turned out to be an astute businessman, but when he bought his dream house—next to the Vatunas family’s compound—the Ducal family’s troubles began: Esra, the Vatunas patriarch, conspired to undercut a business venture of Jason’s and was probably responsible for his murder in 1956; Esra’s son Tivoli may have been Pearl’s lover; and his grandson Dino seemed determined to block Prins— marriage to Lola Vatunas, Dino’s daughter, and tried to deter Prins— efforts to discover who killed Jason. As Pearl hints in deathbed reminiscences and in letters found afterward, living near the Vatunas family permanently blighted the Ducals— lives. Elegiac in mood and rich in evocations of character and setting, a novel that gracefully limns the origins of a domestic—and national—tragedy.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56584-484-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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