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DEVOTION

Name: DEVOTION
Author: Ros Barber
ISBN: 978-1-78074-921-1

by Ros Barber ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016

Barber's sensational premise delivers an unexpectedly piercing exploration of loss and different kinds of faith.

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In a novel that examines the divide between skepticism and religion, Barber (The Marlowe Papers, 2012, etc.) uses the sweeping ideas of faith and science to delve into the story of a man struggling with the ever incomprehensible force of grief.

Finlay Logan is a criminal psychologist in a near-future England where popular opinion and government action are pushing to classify religious fundamentalism as a mental illness. While investigating the medically defined sanity of April Smith, a teenager who committed a shocking atrocity inspired by her religious beliefs, Logan finds himself grappling with his own tenuous grip on mental health. Nearly destroyed by grief after the accidental death of his adored daughter, Logan seeks perverse solace in an excess of work and a growing gulf of misunderstanding between him and his wife. Despite his efforts, he struggles to connect with April enough to assess her sanity and turns to the alluring Gabrielle Salmon, a cognitive scientist who studies consciousness, induces spiritual experiences with lab equipment, and claims to have been in contact with the dead. Logan’s professional interest in belief becomes an intensely personal choice between pharmaceutical and religious salvation. The novel splits into alternate storylines based on his decision, playing with motifs borrowed from quantum mechanics. It survives this brutal division, bolstered by Logan’s fascinatingly miserable character, so finely drawn in competing urges. He is manipulative, unfaithful, dubious, and yet often motivated by the irreproachable urge of love. Though Barber sometimes veers into absurdly extended metaphors, that excess occasionally uncovers extraordinarily beautiful and piercing images that solidify a story of the ineffable. “Her eyes open painfully wide, and in a blink, two teary blinks, are emptied of love and stuffed to their lids with shock.”

Barber's sensational premise delivers an unexpectedly piercing exploration of loss and different kinds of faith.

Pub Date: April 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78074-921-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016

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.