Ferré at her best (as in Eccentric Neighborhoods) can be a soaring, marvelous writer. But Flight of the Swan never gets off...
Ferré bases her third novel written in English on a real historical incident: ballerina Anna Pavlova’s prolonged stay in Puerto Rico (where she was performing) when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917.
What a bland, disappointing book, almost totally devoid of the swirling momentum and vivid specificity that made Ferré’s generational sagas The House on the Lagoon (1995) and Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998) so memorable. Not that “Madame” (as she’s addressed by her former student and all-purpose handmaiden Masha, who narrates) isn’t a charismatic and appealing figure: a woman of pronounced populist sentiments despite the image projected by her trademark “ . . . solo The Dying Swan . . . [as] the personification of the aristocrats’ agony.” The problems are created by the heavy weight of exposition that clogs the first hundred pages, and by imperfectly made connections between Pavlova’s love affair with (the much younger) revolutionary dilettante Diamantino Marquez (“For the first time Madame was insisting that Love was more important than Art,” Masha complains), and an awkward subplot in which Diamantino’s arranged marriage to an heiress is threatened by the presence of his rival, her father’s illegitimate son. The inflamed passions and colorful set pieces (including climactic doings at the Juan Ponce De Lémon Carnival) do help, but can’t overcome a superfluity of undigested research, which frequently takes the form of leaden references to the ballerina’s contemporaries (Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, et al), and largely pointless cameo appearances by such celebrities as “Lone Eagle” American pilot Daniel Dearborn (in other words, Charles Lindbergh). One gets the impression that Ferré undertook this novel without having decided how Anna Pavlova, the Russian Revolution, the class struggle in Puerto Rico, and a woman’s right to express herself artistically and sexually (a constant undercurrent theme) were logically—much less fictionally—related.
Ferré at her best (as in Eccentric Neighborhoods) can be a soaring, marvelous writer. But Flight of the Swan never gets off the ground.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15648-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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
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