THE YELLOW SAILOR

Name: THE YELLOW SAILOR
Author: Steve Weiner
ISBN: 1-58567-169-X

by Steve Weiner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2001

Like a set of surreal flashcards, whipping by to create a crazed, impressionistic portrait of a Europe in which everyone is...

bookshelf

Survivors of a sunken ship traverse a war-torn Europe in Weiner’s picaresque follow-up to The Museum of Love (1994).

Nineteen-year-old sailor Nicholas Bremml boards his first ship, the merchant marine vessel Yellow Sailor, in 1914 in the German port of Hamburg. Delicate and easily frightened, he gets his dose and more of torment from his rough-hewn crewmates. After the ship runs aground in Polish waters, thanks to a critical error Nicholas made in the engine room, the crew scrambles ashore and scatters across a Europe in chaos. Jacek Gorecki, the electrician, dodges firing squads that are shooting deserters and ends up working in a mine. Brothers Karl and Alois are like a demented comedy duo, stumbling from one misadventure to another. Initially full of humor, they slide toward bitterness. Karl declares, “The future lied to us.” Meanwhile, Nicholas searches for meaning in the gutters of Hamburg and Prague, finding it most often in the arms of prostitutes. The Yellow Sailor’s wealthy owner, Julius Bernai, glides comfortably along a more rarified path. Ensconced in a sanitarium, he falls in love with his doctor’s wife, even though he has always loudly proclaimed his homosexuality. Weiner wields his words with the ease of a career novelist. Previously compared to Burroughs and Céline, he has the grim scatological edge of the former and the man-on-the-run, trans-European ambience of the latter, but parts company with both in lacking an urge to shock. Skipping through the years with ease, replete with dreamlike scenarios, this dark carnival of the absurd (dedicated to the Brothers Quay puppeteers) has no targets or prosecutorial ambitions, which is to its credit. It all does leave one wanting more by the end, though: Perhaps in future outings, the author will be able to leave a more lasting mark on the page.

Like a set of surreal flashcards, whipping by to create a crazed, impressionistic portrait of a Europe in which everyone is on the move and nothing is certain.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2001

ISBN: 1-58567-169-X

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001

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.