A mesmerizing celebration of the influence of memory and longing in shaping our imaginations and lives, by a Russian novelist of substantial power and originality. Makine's fourth novel (the first to be translated into English) has already received acclaim in France, where it won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis. The story consists largely of the attempts of Andrei, a Russian ÇmigrÇ in France, to set down his recollections of his beloved grandmother Charlotte. Born in France but raised largely in a small town in Siberia, Charlotte's life spans much of the century, from the years before the 1917 Revolution through her experience of the rise of the Communists and the horrors of the 1930s and WW II. A tough, complex, charming figure, she fascinates Andrei, who spends the summers of his childhood and adolescence with her. She creates for him a vivid portrait of the ``France/Atlantis'' of her childhood, a world far more elegant, carefree, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and '80s. Her warm, artful memories of her homeland and of books (``It was,'' he says, ``indeed essentially a bookish country, a country composed of words'') captivate Andrei. Makine's portrait of the manner in which the romantic Andrei becomes, as a result of his absorption in this other world, an outsider in Russia, and eventually a restless traveler around Europe, is exact and convincing. Not surprisingly, he ends up in France, where he attempts, through ``the silent work of memory,'' to come to grips with the exact nature of his inheritance. It is only through art, Makine suggests, that we can escape the allure of the past, by transmuting it into something that has ``the reality, discreet and spontaneous, of life itself.'' By no means the least pleasure here is Makine's voice: reflective, sensuous, frank. A superb exploration of the sustaining power of memory, and one of the most distinctive novels of the season.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-383-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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