Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.
Memories—elusive, shattered, or tormenting—are central to a tender story of unlikely love.
In his 15th novel, the prolific Jacobson (Pussy, 2017, etc.) considers the debilities of very old age in a shrewd, surprising tale centered on a feisty nonagenarian who wraps herself in boas and baubles and a reticent bachelor. “Memory is a sadist,” observes Mrs. Beryl Dusinbery, who styles herself the Princess, after Scheherazade, seductive teller of tales. But Beryl’s tales are fragmentary and vexing: Troubling memories rise unbidden while the pleasures of her erotic past swirl mistily. “In her heyday,” Jacobson’s wry narrator reports, “Beryl Dusinbery had been able to drive the thought of any other woman out of a man’s mind. It wasn’t infidelity she conjured, it was oblivion.” Now, though, oblivion threatens her, as she struggles to remember the details of her many lovers; mixes up the identities of her two grown sons and their offspring, none of whom interest her; and frustrates her two caregivers with capricious demands. At the age of 91, Shimi Carmelli, like the Princess, exudes old-world sophistication with his “air of elegant, international desolation” and refined wardrobe. Other than in his appearance, though, Carmelli stands in sharp contrast to the Princess: Formerly a seller of phrenology busts, he tells fortunes, reading cards at a local Chinese restaurant and at charity events attended by widows eager for new love. He has lived a circumscribed, solitary life, striving in every way “to remove the stain of common humanity from his person.” Unlike the Princess, Carmelli is beset by remembering. “I have selective morbid hyperthymesia,” he confesses, unable to forget anything, most notably a childhood transgression that has haunted his entire life. Jacobson treats with compassion the dilemma of old age, when the future seems to hold nothing more than “the same, unvarying story” and an inevitable diminishment; instead, he offers his brittle Princess and self-effacing fortuneteller a chance to discover deeply hidden capacities for kindness and caring and the inspiration, as the Princess puts it, to “risk another end.”
Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984824-21-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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