paper 0-86538-095-3 Moving, deeply satisfying fiction, set with great exactitude in 1870s England, that chronicles the turbulent romance of an ambitious, scientist with a gifted young medium. Sir William Herapath, well married and already a respected member of the scientific establishment, is first drawn to the frank young psychic Selene Cook by her reputed powers. Convinced that some kernel of truth lies behind the flummery associated with spiritualism (dismissed by many as mere parlor tricks and smoke), Herapath lets himself be talked into launching a lengthy investigation of Selene’s powers. She moves into his mansion, where, largely ignored by his moody, death-obsessed wife (who has just embraced the wonderfully Victorian fad of taxidermy), Selene begins to seduce Herapath. At the start, she’s simply desperate to escape from her poor, seedy family and make a name for herself. Herapath quickly discovers that her most spectacular gifts (such as manifesting a spirit form while tied to a chair) are false. Only later, after the two have begun an affair, does he discover that she really commands psychic powers; she is, for instance, unerringly able to read people’s futures in their faces. The affair ends disastrously: in an attempt to preserve his reputation, Herapath renounces both the pregnant Selene and his likely discoveries. None of this is entirely surprising. Still, Pritchard (The Instinct for Bliss, 1995, etc.), thanks to the complex life of her characters—and to her sparring but effective use of period diction and detail—manages to make it all seem new. Selene’s last days, and Herapath’s long struggle to deal with his guilt, are rendered with considerable power and emotional resonance. The bittersweet mysticism of the conclusion seems especially apt. A distinctive achievement, both as a historical novel and a romance. Fit to stand on the shelf with Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Byatt’s Possession. (Author tour; TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-86538-094-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century—and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now.
Life and art, death and transfiguration reverberate with protean intensity in the late (1953–2003) Chilean author’s final work: a mystery and quest novel of unparalleled richness.
Published posthumously in a single volume, despite its author’s instruction that it appear as five distinct novels, it’s a symphonic envisioning of moral and societal collapse, which begins with a mordantly amusing account (“The Part About the Critics”) of the efforts of four literary scholars to discover the obscured personal history and unknown present whereabouts of German novelist Benno von Archimboldi, an itinerant recluse rumored to be a likely Nobel laureate. Their searches lead them to northern Mexico, in a desert area notorious for the unsolved murders of hundreds of Mexican women presumably seeking freedom by crossing the U.S. border. In the novel’s second book, a Spanish academic (Amalfitano) now living in Mexico fears a similar fate threatens his beautiful daughter Rosa. It’s followed by the story of a black American journalist whom Rosa encounters, in a subplot only imperfectly related to the main narrative. Then, in “The Part About the Crimes,” the stories of the murdered women and various people in their lives (which echo much of the content of Bolaño’s other late mega-novel The Savage Detectives) lead to a police investigation that gradually focuses on the fugitive Archimboldi. Finally, “The Part About Archimboldi” introduces the figure of Hans Reiter, an artistically inclined young German growing up in Hitler’s shadow, living what amounts to an allegorical representation of German culture in extremis, and experiencing transformations that will send him halfway around the world; bring him literary success, consuming love and intolerable loss; and culminate in a destiny best understood by Reiter’s weary, similarly bereaved and burdened sister Lotte: “He’s stopped existing.” Bolaño’s gripping, increasingly astonishing fiction echoes the world-encompassing masterpieces of Stendhal, Mann, Grass, Pynchon and García Márquez, in a consummate display of literary virtuosity powered by an emotional thrust that can rip your heart out.
Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century—and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-10014-8
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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