THE GRASS MEMORIAL

Name: THE GRASS MEMORIAL
Author: Sarah Harrison
ISBN: 0-312-29086-1

by Sarah Harrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2002

Overwrought and overlong. Horsy symbolism and metaphors of rebirth can’t tie this confusing tale together, and a lot of it...

bookshelf

Three books in one never quite cohere, in the first US appearance for this bestselling British author.

Intertwined lives and eras add up to a scattershot fictional history of England from 1850 on, centering on the village of Church Norton, near an ancient image carved into a chalk hillside centuries ago: a leaping horse. In no particular order, we meet brave Harry Latimer, a cavalry soldier, fighting and suffering in the Crimea; and Rachel, his brother Hugo’s beautiful wife, and their unborn child who is “no more than a pulsing, translucent comma of flesh in Rachel’s womb” when Hugo dies. Ere long, Harry, too, expires dramatically amidst the buttercups with his mare Clemmie; then it’s forward to the present where skinny Stella, “a butterfly bruised but as yet unbroken on the wheel of adulation,” seeks solace from the pain of a failed love affair and the diminishing expectations of her singing career (she’s lead vocalist for a trendy band called Sorority). A late-night journey into her soul leads her somehow to a hillside where she comes across yet another mare in the throes of a difficult birth. Fortunately, her lover Robert soon arrives to help out. Then there’s Spencer, an American veteran of WWII who once loved a girl from Church Norton: Janet, an English rose if ever there was one. But first, a flashback to the rustic hamlet of Moose Draw, Wyoming, and Spencer’s adolescence, featuring the local girl he loved and may have impregnated, and, yes, more horses. (In a self-conscious aside, the author notes that there are many English people in Moose Draw.) Flash forward to the early 1960s and Spencer’s attempt to reunite with Janet. Meanwhile, 40 years in the future, Stella and Robert successfully deliver a wobbly foal.

Overwrought and overlong. Horsy symbolism and metaphors of rebirth can’t tie this confusing tale together, and a lot of it is simply silly.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-312-29086-1

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.