For serious fans of European experimental fiction and Valerie Solanas completists.
The English translation of a Swedish novel that has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
Valerie Solanas is most famous for trying to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968. She is just slightly less famous for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a cri de coeur of outsider feminism. Solanas’ life was not an especially happy one. She said she was sexually assaulted by her father and physically abused by her grandfather. When she first arrived in New York, she supported herself through panhandling and prostitution. While awaiting trial for attempted murder, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Among the vignettes of which this novel is composed are scenes in which the narrator visits Solanas in the Tenderloin hotel where she dies at the age of 52. Biographical fiction is not the same as biography—and Stridsberg is completely within her rights to turn Solanas into a figure of myth inhabiting a world of the author’s own invention—but some of the choices Stridsberg makes are curious. For example, in real life, Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey. In this novel, Valerie grows up in Ventor, Georgia, a city surrounded by desert. It’s as if Stridsberg wants to squeeze all of America into one imaginary place, and this makes Solanas seem generic in a way that she most definitely is not. It's true that this Valerie Solanas is often poetic and eloquent whereas the historical figure was not—a play she had written called Up Your Ass was at the center of her conflict with Warhol—but making beauty out of the hardship of Solanas' life seems inimical to her own work. Solanas was and is regarded as a serious radical theorist by a number of important feminists. She doesn’t need rehabilitation as a figure of tragedy, nor does she need anyone to give her a voice.
For serious fans of European experimental fiction and Valerie Solanas completists.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-15191-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
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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