Not that de Rosnay ever wrote literary fiction, but previous books like Sarah’s Key (2008) have more emotional substance...
A best-selling French author with writer's block agonizes at a luxurious Italian resort in de Rosnay’s oddly static latest (The House I Loved, 2012, etc.).
The main action here consists of 29-year-old Nicolas Kolt sitting around feeling sorry for himself at the Gallo Nero off the Tuscan coast. Oh, sure, he’s rich and famous, thanks to his globally best-selling first novel, The Envelope. But that was published four years ago and was based on the true history of his enigmatic father. Without real-life inspiration to lean on, Nicolas is having a hard time coming up with a new book. Though he assures his anxious publisher that he's writing away, he’s mostly wasting time on social media, exchanging pornographic instant messages with a married woman in Germany, and being told off by old friends for having become lazy, selfish and spoiled. Readers will heartily agree as they endure Nicolas’ solipsistic musings about how much he misses his former love Delphine and how he should really call his mother, all the while checking his Facebook page to see if there are any new photos taken by an anonymous fan who's also vacationing at the Gallo Nero. The swanky setting is over-the-top enough for a Harold Robbins novel (ditto the Blackberry-enabled sex scenes), and de Rosnay’s way of demonstrating that Nicolas is a real writer is to show him watching the other guests, which might work if his observations ever went beyond superficial judgments. His 22-year-old girlfriend, Malvina, is a whiny bore, the extensive flashbacks not much more interesting as they limn Nicolas’ childhood, his father’s mysterious death and his discovery of previously unknown Russian roots. The climactic shipwreck that finally gives Nicolas new literary material is ridiculous but a relief; at least we won’t have to hear any more about his writer’s block.
Not that de Rosnay ever wrote literary fiction, but previous books like Sarah’s Key (2008) have more emotional substance than this.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04513-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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