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SHIRTLESS IN ICELAND

Name: SHIRTLESS IN ICELAND
Author: M.S. Simpson
ISBN: 978-1466201873

by M.S. Simpson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2011

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The ex-pat cafe crowd considers the life worth living in Paris.

In modern Paris, as always, a coterie of privileged, successful, attractive, dissatisfied 20–30somethings contemplate their self-worth over coffee and wine in the city of love’s countless clean, well-lighted places. Paris, in all its chaos and charm, may very well be the navel-gazing capital of the world, and so it serves appropriately as the lively setting for Simpson’s (Six Packs in South Dakota, 2011, etc.) new portrait of malcontents. School teacher Peregrine moved to Paris from America in hopes of distancing himself from his overbearing family while also searching for a deeper meaning in life. But he can’t escape—his family shows up at his doorstep unannounced, and thoughts of death consume him. Most intriguingly, Peregrine’s melancholy is colored by his toxic relationship, as a gay man, to Emma—the buxom, man-eating alpha-female who beguiles all men and women, gay and straight. A colorful cast of personalities populates the novel, each with his or her existential issues, especially Peregrine’s artful mother and his father, Arthur Woodmancy, an author famous for horror novels. Arthur takes pride in their “family fondness for literary references,” a fondness Simpson shares—he namedrops Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Austen, Hardy and many others. Simpson showcases his writing talent in the novel’s many somber, reflective passages, while maintaining a keen sense of detail and place. But attempts to make despair seem fashionable result in a vexing layer of superficial smarminess, exemplified by overcooked repartee. Even the horrific, jarring death at the novel’s center comes across as contrived, weighed down by heavy-handed metaphors. Yet the “cloud-[trek] across and through the murky pandemonium of [Peregrine’s] life” can be a captivating read, albeit as exhausting as expected when audience to a self-absorbed depressive obsessing over his life as a setting sun, unsure if it also rises. A notable effort in need of firmer footing to reach the depths it probes.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2011

ISBN: 978-1466201873

Page Count: 331

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2011

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.