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BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY

Name: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY
Author: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9358-5

by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2013

An interesting experiment in nontraditional fiction but a somewhat disappointing follow-up from a talented new voice.

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It turns out that war is more boring than hell in these tangentially connected short stories from the author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (2009).

The author’s collection feels very much like a product of work created for the audiences of the New Yorker and Granta, publications to which he contributes. While the stories aren’t strictly linked to each other, it’s obvious that they’ve been set in the same world, although Sayrafiezadeh goes to great pains to strip his milieu down to a pure, abstract canvas. The stories are set in a world at war, or wars, somewhere on a peninsula. It’s not always clear which country each story is set in, either, although the United States is clearly identified as one of the combatants. The centerpiece is “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy,” during which an American serviceman named Luke finally finds a way to break up the tedium of war. But the story is a rare jab to readers who may be put off by the obscurity of the rest of the collection. Many of the stories, such as “Cartography” and “Appetite,” deal with characters who are not living up to their potentials, toiling in dead-end jobs. Others, like “Enchantment” and “Operators,” examine the aftermath of war with a perplexing simplicity for a writer who is clearly capable of deeper insights. The soldier in “Enchantment” is particularly disappointing, as he waits for a class of prep school students to recognize that “We won” is the right answer to his question: “I’d hold nothing back and they’d be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means we had available. That was how we won the war.”

An interesting experiment in nontraditional fiction but a somewhat disappointing follow-up from a talented new voice.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9358-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Dial Press

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

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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.