Joyously anchored in the physical world, steeped in storytelling, a delight from start to finish.
Epic novel of rural Poland from two-time Nike Prize winner Mysliwski (The Palace, 1991, etc.).
A nonstop river of narration limns the long, eventful life of Szymek Pietruszka. In his wild youth before World War II, all Szymek wanted to do was drink, dance, fight and sleep with all the girls. After the Nazis invaded Poland, he joined the Resistance; following the war he nonchalantly held down various jobs in town: police officer, haircutter, civil servant. Yet in the end he returned to the small family farm, immersing himself in the rhythms of planting and harvest that ordered his father’s life. Two of his brothers had moved to the city; a third, Michal, was swept up in the communist revolution, but came home a shattered man who never speaks and must be cared for by Szymek. Not so easy, since Szymek’s legs were badly damaged when he was struck by a car while taking his horse-drawn wagon loaded with sheaves across the new paved road that divides his village. The world is moving on, warns the party functionary who refuses to approve his request for cement to build a tomb (that’s not on the list of approved uses): “You can’t live with a peasant soul any more.” But the flow of salty, earthy talk from Szymek, his family and fellow villagers suggests that peasant ways will survive even the invasion of tourists looking to sample “traditional” culture without actually experiencing the boredom of tilling a field or milking a cow. Cognizant of the brutal realities that govern people tied to the land in a close-knit, quarrelsome community, Mysliwski reminds us of the pleasures inherent in such illusion-free existences. “You have to live,” says the storekeeper who cheerfully beds down with Szymek (or any other man who strikes her fancy). “What else is there that’s better?”
Joyously anchored in the physical world, steeped in storytelling, a delight from start to finish.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9826246-2-3
Page Count: 534
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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SEEN & HEARD
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