A thoroughly confused tale whose inarticulate protagonist is the biggest, but by no means the only, source of frustration.
Young lovers fall victim to the machinations of the middle-aged in this limp first novel from South African poet Schwartzman.
On a Monday morning in 1993, the hilly Ghanaian tourist resort of Aburi is in an uproar. One of the town’s most prominent citizens, upscale restaurant owner Nana Aforiwaa, has drowned in the river; her close friend John, headmaster of the local boarding school, is raving and in shock. Nana had been searching for her 16-year-old niece Celeste, gone missing with boyfriend Kwasi, a protégé of John. Nana, who raised Celeste, had with John’s approval encouraged the friendship between their young charges, turning a blind eye to the teenagers’ carrying-on in public. Was Nana a benevolent free spirit, or a lonely meddler with an unhealthy obsession? That’s one of many questions that goes unanswered here. Kwasi becomes the target for the townspeople’s indignation. He moves to Accra to live with his kindly uncle Festus, and puts his painting talents to good use as a signwriter. Celeste joins him. Their love is still intense, but shadowed by guilt over Nana’s death. Shy and awkward, Kwasi can only express himself through his painting. Eventually he bolts, joining the West African diaspora in Paris. Nana’s drowning was no accident, we learn; for the sake of Kwasi and Celeste, John had pushed her under. This does not ring true, and the revelation is handled clumsily. John comes clean to the town doctor, who passes the news on to Festus, who relays the confession to Kwasi in Paris at the very end. So Nana’s murder, which wrecked three lives, is sidelined for much of the narrative. The only flickers of excitement are provided by Schwartzman’s account of “the flesh machine,” the series of handlers who move Kwasi from Accra through Senegal to Paris.
A thoroughly confused tale whose inarticulate protagonist is the biggest, but by no means the only, source of frustration.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37873-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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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