Crooning in tune with the ear and with life, Murray’s saga vamps, dancing, to a glorious end.
Murray writes jazz: A colorful riff on coming of age in the city.
In the final installment of his four-part bildungsroman, octogenarian Murray (Trainwhistle Guitar, 1976, The Spyglass Tree, 1991, The Seven League Boots, 1996) revisits his semiautobiographical character Scooter for an exuberant intellectual romp around the streets of 1930s New York. After a few years on the road playing bass with the legendary Bossman, the brilliant, wandering Scooter arrives in New York to pursue a master’s in the humanities—and meets up with old friends. Beyond the reaches of campus, the streets and studios of New York offer an ongoing moveable feast of ideas. Scooter reconnects with Taft Edison, a Ralph Ellison–like writer working to bring the down-home idiom into his ever expanding novel; Royal Highness, a magnanimous big man from the band days, and Roland Beasely, a vibrant, imaginative painter. As Scooter and compatriots duck in and out of bars, art galleries and jazz clubs discussing French poetry, soul food and cubist art, Scooter seems to be always on the verge of finding the magic keys to his own inner music, to art, to literature and perhaps to life itself. If the book is salted with Taft’s discussions about how to bring the black idiom into the novel, Murray seems to have found his own inimitable solution: for page after page, the prose rocks, croons and sings. When it sometimes seems that nothing is happening, the jaunty swinging language it’s not happening in propels the ear forward nonetheless. As Murray writes, “describing . . how the sounds are made is elementary for musicians themselves, but all of that is only a matter of craft. But when my band plays something I want the craft to add up to what good music is supposed to do for people who come to hear it and dance. . . .”
Crooning in tune with the ear and with life, Murray’s saga vamps, dancing, to a glorious end.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42353-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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