Overly broad but brilliant.
Yan (The Four Books, 2015, etc.) returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and “contemporary China’s incomprehensible absurdity.”
Yan puts what he calls “mythorealism”—a blend of fabulation, wishful thinking, and willful suspension of reality—to work in his yarn of a village flanking the Balou Mountains, a geographical entity familiar to readers of his Lenin’s Kisses(2012). Nothing much happens in Explosion, a hamlet founded by a hundred-odd refugees from a long-ago volcano. Most of those people, Yan tells us, were named Kong or Zhu, and most “claimed to be descendants of Confucius, though there are no genealogical records to corroborate this claim.” Alas, the newest generation of Explosionites lacks the conservative Confucian impulse to leave well enough alone, and soon a hutful of Kong brothers (“Our family will produce an emperor,” says their mother, “but I don’t know which of our four sons it will be”) is vying to consolidate power against the resistance, intentional or not, of their fellow villagers. Says one would-be king Kong to his more effectively ambitious sibling, “My brother, your entire life you have been foiled by women.” True enough. Yan’s yarn might have been more fun if it had tacked into Lysistrataterritory, but as it is it has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness. Indeed, his satire is careful and crafty: we all know that when Kong Mingyao says to Kong Mingliang, “Brother, we are truly corrupt,” he is speaking of every Chinese official who would sacrifice the public good for private gain. As it is, the premise is so sweeping—a cabal of Explosionites decides to take their city from whistle-stop to mega-metropolis in a generation, going from hundreds to tens of millions, and all sorts of mayhem ensues—that it can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire, which probably won’t do much to keep Yan out of trouble with the censors in Beijing.
Overly broad but brilliant.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2582-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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