Fans of Maurice Chevalier won’t be pleased, but Modiano’s admirers will find this early work fascinating.
“I know the life stories of these shadows is of no great interest to anyone, but if I didn’t write it down, no one else would do it”: three early novels by Nobel Prize–winning French author Modiano (Suspended Sentences, 2014, etc.) that look back to the years of the Nazi occupation.
In terms of storytelling, the first novel in the trilogy, La Place de l’Étoile (originally published in 1968)—the title refers to both the Parisian plaza and the requirement that Jews wear stars of David as identification—is the least conventional. It begins in the middle of things: “This was back when I was frittering away my Venezuelan inheritance.” Who is “I,” and what is this Venezuelan treasure? Working backward into the story, Modiano recounts the histories, invented and real, of an alter ego named Raphäel Schlemilovitch, who, in various guises, is revealed to be a Jew who has nothing but admiration for the German occupiers of France: “My God, how handsome were the youths on the far side of the Rhine!” The homoerotic yearning is widely shared: as the story moves along, Schlemilovitch becomes less and less attractive, even as his collaboration is shown to be commonplace. Yet it's also subtle; the presence of the Germans encourages all sorts of bad behavior, including the pornographic impulses of an aristocrat who wishes no less than “to prostitute French literature in its entirety.” It’s a strange adventure, reminiscent at times of the Céline of Castle to Castle. In the second novella, The Night Watch (1969), announcing a favorite theme, Modiano works a puzzle of unfixed identities, its narrator a double agent of whose sympathies we can never quite be sure. “I hereby authorize my biographer to refer to me simply as 'a man,' and wish him luck,” Modiano writes, meaningfully. The third, Ring Roads (1972), extends that puzzle across generations as it depicts more or less ordinary people simply trying to survive.
Fans of Maurice Chevalier won’t be pleased, but Modiano’s admirers will find this early work fascinating.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-372-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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