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THE REMAINDER

Name: THE REMAINDER
Author: Alia Trabucco Zerán
ISBN: 978-1-56689-550-7

by Alia Trabucco Zerán ; translated by Sophie Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2019

Thanatofiction at its best and a debut that leaves the reader wanting more.

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First novel by a Chilean literary scholar who serves up a centrifugal story of death, history, and mathematics.

Felipe Arrabal, a young man living in Santiago, and his friend Iquela have an unusual ability: They can see the dead, legions of whom are to be found in what he describes as “the strangest of places: lying at bus stops, on curbs, in parks, hanging from bridges and traffic lights, floating down the Mapocho.” The dead are everywhere, and Felipe uses “apocalyptic maths” to try to account for them all, millions on millions, their number added to dramatically by the murderous military government of Pinochet and company. Iquela’s heart goes aflutter when she meets Paloma, an ever so cool young woman who has come to Santiago from Berlin; she smokes, has blonde hair, looks tough, and knows the ways of the world. Paloma is so mysterious that a cop wonders whether to bust her for smoking underage “or let her do as she pleased.” Clearly Paloma does what she pleases most of the time, raised, like Iquela, in a home that has deep, hidden roots in the anti-Pinochet resistance movement. “We were so young,” laments Iquela’s mother, looking back on the day she met Paloma’s mom, who, alas, has died—and now her body has gone missing somewhere on the other side of the Andes. She might be anywhere, Iquela observes: in an airplane hangar, in a morgue, back home in Berlin, or “locked inside the photograph hanging on the wall of my mother’s dining room.” Clueless, the three go on a winding journey in search of the wayward body, adding “an improvised inventory of corpses” to Felipe’s endless calculations. The story is told matter-of-factly, with a few hints of magical realism layered in, especially as it draws to a close: They might be angels or Valkyries, perhaps ghosts themselves, but whatever they are, they’re memorable companions on a strange trip.

Thanatofiction at its best and a debut that leaves the reader wanting more.

Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-56689-550-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CLEAN
by Alia Trabucco Zerán ; translated by Sophie Hughes

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN WOMEN KILL
by Alia Trabucco Zerán ; translated by Sophie Hughes

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

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STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

- BOOK TO SCREEN
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4 New Adaptations To Watch in October

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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.