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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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