A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal.
Israeli novelist Yehoshua (The Liberated Bride, 2003, etc.) explores our obligations to the dead in an emotionally powerful novel.
The central event—the death of a young woman—happens before the story opens, but informs all of what will come for the main character, an unnamed human-resources manager. Yulia Ragayev, a cleaning woman for a bakery in Jerusalem, is killed in a suicide bombing, and when no one claims her body, a fiery newspaper reporter denounces the woman’s employer. Unwilling to be cast as a heartless businessman, the bakery’s kindly owner gives the company’s HR guy the task of finding Yulia’s family. After a moving tour of the places where Yulia’s marginal life unfolded, the man, heart-stricken that this beautiful woman was, in fact, a lonely illegal immigrant, begins to feel a connection with her. Accompanied by the opportunistic reporter, he brings Yulia’s body to the impoverished Eastern European country she left in search of a better life. The journey is curiously liberating for the man, who—divorced, estranged from his own daughter, careless about making human connections—sees in Yulia a wasted life with redemptive possibilities. The story ends with an unexpected plot twist that dovetails perfectly with Yehoshua’s subtle ruminations on what constitutes family and home. The narrative strategy of naming the dead woman while referring to everyone else by their job titles is, like the emotional restraint of Yehoshua’s writing, characteristic of his political bluntness and more subdued hopefulness.
A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101226-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
IN THE NEWS
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
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
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