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RISPONDIMI

Name: RISPONDIMI
Author: Susanna Tamaro
ISBN: 0-385-50351-2

by Susanna Tamaro & translated by John Cullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Holy abstractions brightened by dollops of sex and violence.

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Three novellas set in the author’s native Italy and connected by spiritual/religious themes of good and evil, love and redemption.

In the title story, Tamaro (Follow Your Heart, 1995, etc.) recounts a young girl’s downward slide after her mother’s death when the girl is eight. In her boarding school, she’s considered an orphan by the nuns until, several years later, a great-uncle and his wife become her guardians and she’s sent to visit them on her vacations. Unfortunately, unlike the kindly nuns, these relatives are cold and mercenary, their religion harsh. After various cruelties, the now-17-year-old drops out of school and works as a nanny for a teacher who treats her with real kindness and generosity. But the teacher’s husband takes advantage of her, then, to save face, accuses her of theft when she becomes pregnant. Having chosen to bear the child despite her unhappy past, she sits in the sun pondering good and evil. “Hell Does Not Exist” concerns a middle-aged woman whose recently deceased husband, a wealthy and educated man, showed a benevolent face to the world but was a viciously cruel husband and father. He despised his son Michelle for his sensitivity and his religious devotion; the story includes a long, almost unreadable letter from the saintly boy. After a violent argument, the man storms out of the house and, careening down the driveway in his car, accidentally strikes Michelle, killing him instantly. The woman can forgive neither him nor herself for her own weakness is staying married to such a man. The husband and father who narrates “The Burning Forest” killed his wife years earlier in an act of madness brought on by too much love when her growing independence (and religiosity) drove him toward a state of delusional paranoia. Redemption comes when his estranged daughter finally answers one of his letters.

Holy abstractions brightened by dollops of sex and violence.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-385-50351-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002

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.