Written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight—a rueful masterpiece.
In his magnificent first novel, poet Majmudar (O°, O°, 2009) embodies the terrible days following the partition of India and Pakistan in the stories of four refugees from sectarian violence.
Keshav and Shankar are 6-year-old twins, separated from their mother in a crush of Hindus trying to get on the last train for Delhi from what is now Pakistan. On the same day in India, Dr. Ibrahim Masud arrives at his looted clinic, where the terrified gatekeeper tells him, “The city isn’t safe for any Mussulman.” Simran and her family are Sikhs; she flees as her father prepares to kill his wife and daughters rather than have them soiled by their Muslim neighbors. Observing them all is the spirit of the twins’ dead father; his initially startling narration gives the novel the distance it needs to chronicle horrifyingly brutal events. Muslims stop a train full of Hindus and murder everyone on board. Men burning down a Muslim lawyer’s house turn to douse a boy with kerosene, not caring that the child they’re about to incinerate is also Hindu. The breakdown of civil order is epitomized by a young thug who snares the twins and sells them to a childless widow, then joins a roving gang looking for stranded girls to force into prostitution. They pick up Simran, but she escapes and finds refuge with Masud, as do Keshav and Shankar. The doctor stands at the story’s moral center, treating the sick and injured of all ethnicities in the vast caravans of refugees streaming toward the India/Pakistan border from both directions. He’s not the only one: A Sikh bus driver, a farmer and a prostitute all risk their lives to help others, “reminded…of a lost, golden past, before the invention of borders, when [kindness was] possible.” Each character must grapple with the choice between kindness and cruelty, and the otherworldly narrator understands that either choice is equally likely in a world gone mad.
Written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight—a rueful masterpiece.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9395-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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