by David Bezmozgis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2011
By no means the book it might have been. But Bezmozgis is a potent writer who may yet astonish us all.
A Russian Jewish family travels to America in decades following the Revolution that defined their patriarch’s life, in this grim first novel from the prize-winning Latvian-born author (Natasha and Other Stories, 2004).
The Krasnanskys—retired businessman Samuil, his stoical wife Emma, their married sons Karl and Alec, the latter’s spouses, and a pair of grandsons—make their way to Rome en route to Chicago. But the relative who was to have sponsored them must instead accommodate a black-sheep sibling, and the Krasnanskys decide to try their luck in Canada (“It’s more European than America, and more American than Europe”). The episodic narrative that develops from this compromise encompasses Samuil’s burden of memories, both proud and regretful (he never ceases mourning the disappearance of his brother Reuven, a more idealistic version of Samuil’s pragmatic self); the troublesome exigencies to which plodding Karl and self-absorbed, sensual Alec drive themselves; and the sorrows of Alec’s winsome, sensitive wife Polina, haunted by fallout from a lost love and an unwanted abortion. Bezmozgis creates a fascinating structure: Events occurring in the narrative present are juxtaposed with flashbacks to similar events which echo and illuminate them. But the resulting fullness gives an impression of redundancy and overemphasis, even when crucial distinctions are lucidly made. It all seems more like “the emigrant experience” than this family’s experience of emigration. And yet, the vividness of its characters and several superbly handled scenes, including a Rosh Hashanah pageant at which Polina endures painfully mixed emotions while watching other people’s children perform, and a brutally funny account of a scam involving stolen Russian ikons which climaxes in a chop shop, keep recalling the novel to vivid life. The result is a flawed, fascinating chronicle, reminiscent of another honorable failure about lives stolen, cast away and never fully recovered: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson (2008).
By no means the book it might have been. But Bezmozgis is a potent writer who may yet astonish us all.Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-28140-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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