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HOTEL MOSCOW

Name: HOTEL MOSCOW
Author: Talia Carner
ISBN: 978-0-06-238859-9

by Talia Carner ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015

Still, the novel sheds much-needed light on this turbulent period in Russian history.

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An American investment adviser, on a mission to counsel businesswomen in post-glasnost Russia, encounters corruption, organized crime, and extreme sexism.

In 1993, the Russian economy is reeling under the extreme measures introduced by Boris Yeltsin to shock the country into capitalism. Brooke Fielding, on furlough from a Manhattan investment firm, accepts an invitation from Sidorov, head of an official-sounding “Economic Authority,” to join a team of experts mentoring female Russian entrepreneurs. When she's shaken down by customs agents at the airport, Brooke realizes that being American is no protection against a civilization in free fall. In the seedy, bug-infested Hotel Moscow, where Brooke’s group is housed, service and meals are grudging and skimpy, respectively. The only child of Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, Brooke is also shocked by the unapologetic anti-Semitism she observes. When their tour bus takes them to a woman-owned factory, Brooke and the other visitors witness an attack by gangsters who stab the company’s controller and beat up managers including Svetlana, one of Brooke’s guides. Svetlana and Olga, a prominent sociologist, take up the story, illustrating the harsh conditions they endure now that the social safety net conferred by communism has unraveled. Olga, elderly at 48, has her car capriciously confiscated by her boss and is mugged on the street by thugs who steal her hard-won groceries. Olga’s best friend, Vera, owner of a cookware factory, has been tortured by gangsters. Svetlana, struggling to raise her daughter in a cramped communal apartment, is raped by Sidorov. After rejecting the help of a handsome fellow American whose motives she distrusts, Brooke embarks on an audacious plan to find out who—among many possible miscreants—is targeting the women, even though a long-ago indiscretion has rendered her vulnerable to blackmail. Generalized commentary, not to mention some PowerPoint-worthy business lectures, occasionally interrupts the far more compelling narrative of lives lived in dystopia.

Still, the novel sheds much-needed light on this turbulent period in Russian history.

Pub Date: June 2, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-238859-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015

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.