An experimental, deeply meta novel about the search for meaning and the disappointments of reality.
A struggling American writer, a Brazilian librarian, and a Mormon historian come together in a dubious mission to unearth a long-lost science-fiction masterpiece.
Wirkus (City of Brick and Shadow, 2014) delved into the lives of Mormon missionaries in his debut novel and here makes a science fictional play at The Book of Mormon with a lightly comical meditation on the search for meaning in literature. It begins in a very meta fashion as “Tim Wirkus” meets Danny Laszlo, an old Brigham Young University creative-writing classmate, who presses upon the author his translation of a story by an obscure Brazilian science-fiction writer. Sad-sack Danny picks up the narration, relating how he ended up in Sao Paolo on a deceitful writing scholarship from the Coalition of Aggrieved Christians, who want him to write a book about Mormon missionaries in Brazil. But a more intriguing mystery presents itself when Danny’s library liaison, Sérgio Antunes, gives him several stories by Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie, a long-forgotten sci-fi novelist whose most famous work was to be titled The Infinite Future. They find this description, written in his own hand: “Strictly speaking, THE INFINITE FUTURE is not a novel. It is, instead, a prose-poem epic that discerns in the imagined empires of the future the germ of humanity’s eventual henosis—its sublime and terrible union with the infinite future. It is, in other words, a prophetic text on a par with the Holy Bible or the I Ching.” (Spoiler alert: it is not.) Next we get a prolonged road trip during which Danny and Sergio connect with Dr. Harriet Kimball, a disgruntled Mormon historian, to track down the mysterious author in the wilds of Idaho. The revelation that follows is a surprise by itself, but then Wirkus offers more than 150 pages of The Infinite Future, a pulpy yet literary nugget that reads like a cross between Flash Gordon and The Seventh Seal.
An experimental, deeply meta novel about the search for meaning and the disappointments of reality.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2432-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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