The title of this collection is ironic; any love that flows here is wayward and all too perishable.
The Icelandic-American novelist (Walking into the Night, 2003, etc.) titles the 12 stories in this collection after months of the year.
Fires burn merrily in the opening stories, the winter months, but the mood is bleak. Tomas, in “January,” is a decent guy crippled by emotional reserve; he failed his one serious love interest, Maureen, in her hour of need; ten years later, he fails her again. Jon and Linda (“February”) had a good marriage until Jon strayed. Both want to repair the damage, but the prospects are dimmed by a clever surprise ending. Karl and Jenny, Icelanders vacationing at a Colorado ski resort (“March”), also have a solid marriage, but an accident reopens the wound caused by their childlessness. The longer stories have a richer emotional texture. Johann and Karen were a close-knit couple until Karen met Janet; it was love at first sight for both of them (“May”). The couple’s breakup is amicable until a garage sale of their belongings, when Johann goes berserk, in an electrifying close. In the deliciously twisty “June,” Soley is a newlywed devoted to both her controlling father and her seemingly strong husband, but exposure to his disorder (vertigo) and her father’s wiles end her marriage. Not all the stories end in disaster. Jakob, on vacation in Slovenia with his wife, Iris, suffers paranoia and anxiety over a dalliance that occurred there years before, but there’s a glimmer of a happy ending (“August”). Edda is a quiet, conservative Icelander married to an American, Mark, a brash lightweight (“September”). Does she love him or just pity him? The jury is out. There’s not an ounce of fat on most of these stories; Olafsson is an admirably brisk, compelling narrator. In the two skimpy tales that end the year, however, he seems to be running out of steam, perhaps a prisoner of his own format.
The title of this collection is ironic; any love that flows here is wayward and all too perishable.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42468-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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