Touching and honest, but unsatisfying all the same: Samuel’s monologue seems, not surprisingly, to be written more for the...
A somewhat lugubrious debut from French playwright Reza (the Tony Award–winning Art).
In the tradition of Mauriac, Reza has created an intensely interior work, essentially a long monologue by an old man who looks over the events of his life as he faces the prospect of death and eternity. Samuel, the narrator, is a Parisian Jew who spent most of his life in the garment trade and did quite well. He keeps an apartment in town but spends more of his time in the country, in the home of Nancy, his second wife. His daughter is married to a dutiful but unimaginative pharmacist, and they have a baby boy—the narrator’s only grandchild. Samuel’s son is on a “sabbatical” year abroad, wandering from Mombasa to Kuala Lumpur to God-knows-where, and Samuel addresses much of his meditation to him, wondering what he is going to do with his life and when he is going to find some direction. An avid gardener, Samuel meets Genevieve Abramowitz, an old friend, at a flower show in Paris one day and proceeds to spend the rest of the day with her. As they reminisce about old friends and lovers (this is Paris, after all), Genevieve tells him how she “killed” their mutual friend Leo Fench (who had been Genevieve’s lover) by dropping him for another man. Samuel, for his part, recalls a long affair he had with Marisa Botton, the wife of one of his clients in Rouen. Cantankerous, rude, and cheap, Samuel is not the sort who inspires love easily, but his long confession, although seemingly pointless at times, succeeds in humanizing him and opens his heart to a degree that one rarely finds in first-person narratives. By the end, he has become more sympathetic than one could have expected.
Touching and honest, but unsatisfying all the same: Samuel’s monologue seems, not surprisingly, to be written more for the stage than the page.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41087-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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