Drawn in part from the true-life diaries of Maria Spada, this unusual novel, reflecting the war in microcosm, captures a...
War and resistance, sexual awakening and shell shock, sacrifice and survival color the extreme coming-of-age of an Italian teenager experiencing the last year of World War I among the gentry in a small country town.
Humor overlays tragedy in Molesini’s impressively controlled, gently paced, ultimately piercing debut. The setting is the Villa Spada in Refrontolo, Italy, home to an aristocratic family—two grandparents; aunt Maria; 17-year-old orphaned grandson Paolo—and their servants. It’s 1917 and, with occupying German troops billeted in the town, atrocities have been committed: women have been raped; valuables looted. While the family attempts to maintain its role in the community, Paolo assists its steward, Renato, a member of military intelligence, in running missions, including rescuing a downed British pilot. Times are hard, food is short, and life is perilous, yet Molesini’s portrait of the community is delivered with a light, often wry touch. Grandma’s enemas are a weekly ritual and her enema bags a good place to hide valuables. The villa’s shutters and washing line are used to send coded messages. And Paolo’s adventures with Renato are matched, for thrills, by his sexual relationship with Giulia, a beautiful but unpredictable older woman. But tragedy gradually takes the upper hand. The German troops are replaced by Austro-Hungarians who, as the 1918 offensive begins, suffer devastating losses; and Paolo, assisting with the wounded and on a steep learning curve, eventually plays his own part in the historic proceedings. While Molesini can’t refrain from dropping plangent hints about the world that awaits after this war is over, it’s the tragic impact on the Spada family that the reader will remember.
Drawn in part from the true-life diaries of Maria Spada, this unusual novel, reflecting the war in microcosm, captures a turning point in the fates of empires.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2434-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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