THE SEVENTH DAY

Name: THE SEVENTH DAY
Author: Yu Hua
ISBN: 978-0-804-19786-1

by Yu Hua ; translated by Allan H. Barr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2015

Compelling moments and black humor go some way toward relieving the lugubrious funk of this episodic work, which might adapt...

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In this melancholy view of the afterlife, dying without a burial place leaves a man in limbo, where he revisits his life through memories and the spirits he encounters.

The life story of Yang Fei begins, like Yu's 2009 epic, Brothers, on a toilet, a hole in the floor of a China train. The character’s mother, near term, is kneeling over the aperture when she gives birth through it and faints. The infant is found and raised by a kindly railroad switchman, and their relationship, as the boy matures, finds and loses the love of a woman and returns to see his father through a final illness, is the novel’s sweet center. Other committed couples will appear with various ties to Yang Fei, including two bickering chess players who are skeletons (limbo is flesh-optional) and recall the titular siblings of the previous novel. Yu Hua may be saying something about the persistence of love beyond death. He is certainly commenting, often acerbically, on how life and death are valued in contemporary China, where a young woman dies while trying to get the attention of her boyfriend, who then dies after selling a kidney to buy her a burial plot. Officials manipulate death tolls from a store fire to avoid embarrassment. A couple weary from work fails to heed the warning that their building is being demolished. Unwanted infants and fetuses are dumped in a river. The novel’s hero enters life as an apparent turd. He leaves life, by the way, because he is too engrossed in reading a newspaper account of his ex-wife’s suicide to absorb the panic around him in a restaurant that soon explodes from a kitchen fire.

Compelling moments and black humor go some way toward relieving the lugubrious funk of this episodic work, which might adapt well as a one-man show for John Leguizamo but falls short of being a fully realized novel.

Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-804-19786-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOY IN THE TWILIGHT
by Yu Hua ; translated by Allan H. Barr

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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.