Somewhere in Eastern Europe, somewhere between Kafka and Orwell, a corporate flunky awakens to life and his government’s stranglehold on it—in a bleakly poetic, slow-moving debut by storywriter Frederick. Petir receives a phone call from Eduard, whom he once knew (but not well), asking him to rendezvous in Eduard’s stead with a lover, and for reasons he doesn’t begin to understand, Petir agrees. The woman is fetching but distant, serving to deepen Petir’s dissatisfaction with his lot—that of a divorced, apolitical workaholic. In his confusion, he takes another unfathomable step: he writes personally to one of the pesky claimants whose hopes—whatever they may be—it is really Petir’s job to squelch. For his trouble he receives an eyeless bird’s head and peasant curses from the claimant, Pund, a loner who lost his leg in an accident for which Petir’s company refuses to provide compensation. Then Eduard is killed (in women’s clothing) on the edge of a lawless, teeming refugee encampment outside their city, and Petir realizes that he’ll never be able to return to his former state of blissful ignorance. Pund harasses and assaults him, his ex-wife reenters his life as a lesbian, and Eduard’s lover begins to take an interest in him. Finally, a repressed childhood memory kicks in, and he begins to come to terms with the fact that his mother had sent him out of the house just before she blew it up with his father and herself inside. As the state’s true totalitarian nature grows more apparent every day, and civil unrest intensifies, Petir endures his various other torments, then decides to risk a small but exquisite humanitarian gesture, reaching out to nemesis Pund in an act that redeems them both. A novel with such a full cargo of lonely souls needs more wind in its sails; this one’s becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of introspective flotsam and loose ends.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-013-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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