Tracing the rise, fall and subsequent reinvention of a generation through a few key relationships, this deliberately...
Four Parisians navigate a shifting personal and political landscape in a modern, sexually liberated Europe.
Tracing the rise, fall and subsequent reinvention of a generation through a few key relationships, this deliberately provocative novel makes for a gossipy snapshot of the French intelligentsia. The narrator, Elizabeth “Liz” Levallois, is a chic pop-culture journalist who is conducting a longtime affair with Jean-Michel “Leibo” Leibowitz, a married Jewish intellectual best known for writing a book about fidelity. A one-time leftist, he finds himself, as the years go by, shifting to the right, taking on a contrarian’s role. Liz writes for the same newspaper as Leibo’s college pal Dominique Rossi, aka Doum, a local gay icon who came of age in the fabulous, anything-goes '80s. Liz fatefully introduces him to William Miller, aka Willie, a naïve younger man from the provinces. They fall in love, with Doum, who is HIV positive, taking the self-absorbed Willie under his wing. After the two split up, Doum, in the spirit of the times, takes a leadership role advocating for safe sex within the gay community. Willie, motivated by perversity, self-destruction and a twisted kind of love, consequently makes a name for himself as a defiant anti-safe sex ambassador. Preaching a subversive “no condoms” gospel, Willie becomes more and more obsessed with “destroying” his ex. Lacking Doum’s connections and coherence, he posts humiliating and pornographic photos of Doum on the Internet, and gets him marginalized in the gay-activist organization that he founded. But eventually, enough is enough, as Doum teams up with Leibo for a book and media tour that manages to make them both relevant again. Meanwhile, fading enfant terrible Willie spirals out of control–with disastrous results. That leaves a rueful Liz to pick up the pieces and question her choices. A sensation when it was first released in the author’s native France, Garcia’s debut is filled with multiple cultural touchstones and a “you had to have been there” insider quality that could put off some readers.Edgy, pretentious roman à clef.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-911-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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