Smoothly and unobtrusively translated, this debut grabs, holds, then plunges you into a world pervaded by a kind of mundane...
From Finland, a taut and elegant thriller about love, obsession and murder.
Two decent people are caught in a trap the jaws of which are closing so slowly that a detached observer might think escape is possible. But nobody here is detached. Human triangles are inherently explosive, and Lang, the central figure, finds this one particularly volatile. Charming and erudite, Lang is the host of a long-running TV talk show called The Blue Hour. It has nothing to do with salacious humor; think Charlie Rose instead. Likable though Lang is to his audience and even his friends, he doesn't much like himself. He frets and feels purposeless and used up. Then he meets Sarita, falls overwhelmingly in love and almost at once experiences a heady, totally unexpected emotional rebirth. Sarita is lovely, sexy and, more importantly, sympathetic to Lang. She understands and can cope with the vagaries of a highly complex personality. Naturally, Lang is bewitched. Sarita, too, though not with Lang but with Marko, her estranged husband. The two have known each other since they were very young. Marko is both the father of Sarita's child and the fateful cloud that hangs over her head. He's unstable, often vicious, and certainly dangerous, a demonic presence she's never been able to exorcise. A perceptive friend warns Lang that he's out of his depth and advises him to cut and run, to “save your own skin. Those two belong together, don't you understand?” Lang does understand, but he can't run, even to save his own skin. Inevitably, the jaws of the trap snap violently shut.
Smoothly and unobtrusively translated, this debut grabs, holds, then plunges you into a world pervaded by a kind of mundane grimness, dark in its own signature way: Nordic noir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1724-6
Page Count: 188
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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