A PERFECT DISHARMONY

Name: A PERFECT DISHARMONY
Author: Sébastien Brebel
ISBN: 978-1-943150-28-1

by Sébastien Brebel ; translated by Jesse Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2017

Brebel writes well, and the stories are elegantly translated, but there’s only one gear on his voiture, and his writing...

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The paradox embedded in the title captures the existential mood of these 13 stories, in which characters remain largely anonymous and situations full of angst.

French novelist Brebel’s (Francis Bacon's Armchair, 2016, etc.) book comes in at just about 100 pages, so each story unfolds quickly—though “story” in a formal sense is perhaps a misnomer. Brebel is instead a chronicler of pain and meaninglessness. In “Off-Season,” for example, almost every sentence begins with the word “She,” and the life of this unnamed woman is presented in simple, declarative sentences: “She subsists solely on cereal and canned food and consumes large amounts of instant coffee. She limits her electricity usage to the necessary minimum and brushes her teeth at least three times a day.” When a man enters her room, she fantasizes about his intentions, but they exchange no words and she subsides into the mundanity of her existence. In “Intimacy,” a man “reads” a photograph of his former girlfriend and tries to conjure up the circumstances under which it was taken. Because the photo shows her in a bathtub, he projects himself into the sensuality of the image as well as into the hypothetical lasciviousness of the photographer. Ultimately, of course, she remains an image and an object, separated from the narrator’s life. “Infiltration” focuses on a woman who once again experiences the tension between fantasy and the quotidian. At one point a man gives her his hotel room key, and she enters the room when she knows he’s not there. She searches the room and dreamily fantasizes about what she might mean to him, concluding that “they would make...a mismatched and pathetic couple, their life together obsessively regimented by the whim of her emotions while he devotedly obeyed her smallest requests.”

Brebel writes well, and the stories are elegantly translated, but there’s only one gear on his voiture, and his writing scarcely discloses a shred of humor.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-943150-28-1

Page Count: 101

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

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.