THE FEW THINGS I KNOW ABOUT GLAFKOS THRASSAKIS

Name: THE FEW THINGS I KNOW ABOUT GLAFKOS THRASSAKIS
Author: Vassilis Vassilikos
ISBN: 1-58322-527-7

by Vassilis Vassilikos & translated by Karen Emmerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2002

In the tradition of A.J.A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo, a brilliant tale of witty and sophisticated fun. Long established as a...

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First English translation of a 1978 novel by the eminent Greek author (of Z, 1968, among others), this time an account of a biographer setting out to piece together a coherent study of a celebrated and mysterious writer.

Biographers have a hard time keeping their own lives from intruding on their subjects’, and our unnamed narrator is having a harder time than most. He has been commissioned to write a biography of Greek writer Glafkos Thrassakis by the cultural affairs department of the Common Market—mainly at the behest of a Danish countess who had an affair with Glafkos many years ago (and tried to seduce the biographer, too, at their first meeting). He is happy to take on the assignment, since Glafkos is an important figure in modern Greek literature and politics alike, but there are many difficulties. First, Glafkos (who was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea) left all his papers and archives under seal for 25 years. Second, the writer lived mainly in exile, so most of his friends and colleagues are spread out across the globe. Then, too, in the course of his research, the biographer discovers that much of the official story of Glafkos’s life is plainly false. For one thing, it appears he wasn’t eaten by cannibals at all but murdered by political extremists in West Berlin. More questions arise: Why did an anti-American leftist like Glafkos send his archives to an American university? What was his real reason for leaving Greece? Why did he never return? The more deeply the biographer probes, the murkier the evidence—and the more he despairs of ever finding out who Glafkos really was, if he even existed at all. Even more frightening, he begins to wonder if he is Glafkos. And, if he is, has he invented Glafkos—or has Glafkos destroyed him?

In the tradition of A.J.A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo, a brilliant tale of witty and sophisticated fun. Long established as a classic of contemporary Greek fiction, it deserves a wide audience here, too.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002

ISBN: 1-58322-527-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Seven Stories

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

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.