While Bitov’s intelligence and gift for intellectual play are never in doubt, the novel hits the head rather than the heart.
A postmodern novel of dizzying intricacy.
Bitov plays mind games of all sorts with his readers—he includes puns, excerpts from made-up novels, false footnotes and comments on nonexistent manuscripts. The book's subtitle is “A Novel-Echo,” and from the title page, Bitov moves immediately into a second title page for The Teacher of Symmetry, a novel supposedly published in 1937 and written by A. Tired-Boffin. But wait…in an introductory note, Bitov talks about how this obscure novel had played an important role in his life and how he’d labored to translate it into Russian, so The Symmetry Teacher becomes an elaboration of Tired-Boffin’s novel…which is about an author named Urbino Vanoski, who’s written several books, excerpts of which appear in Bitov’s novel—with commentary by Tired-Boffin. Among the most amusing “excerpts” is “The End of the Sentence,” supposedly from Vanoski’s A Fly on a Ship. Here, we meet his narrator, Anton (are we not now at three or four removes from reality?), Tishkin (a “bombist” or terrorist), and Tishkin’s lover, Manya—and yes, the pun on “mania” is intended. Throughout the novel (Bitov’s? Tired-Boffin’s? Vanoski’s?), we find literary jokes such as the following epigraph: “The end of the sentence must be marked by a period.—A rule of punctuation.” In addition, one entire chapter is an excerpt from a poem by Ris Vokonabi, yet another fictional creation, and another chapter, “Posthumous Notes of the Tristram Club,” echoes both Dickens and Tristram Shandy.
While Bitov’s intelligence and gift for intellectual play are never in doubt, the novel hits the head rather than the heart.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-27351-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.
Short-story virtuoso Saunders' (Tenth of December, 2013, etc.) first novel is an exhilarating change of pace.
The bardo is a key concept of Tibetan Buddhism: a middle, or liminal, spiritual landscape where we are sent between physical lives. It's also a fitting master metaphor for Saunders’ first novel, which is about suspension: historical, personal, familial, and otherwise. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president, sort of, although he is not yet dead. Rather, he is in a despair so deep it cannot be called mere mourning over his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. Saunders deftly interweaves historical accounts with his own fragmentary, multivoiced narration as young Willie is visited in the netherworld by his father, who somehow manages to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, at least temporarily. But the sneaky brilliance of the book is in the way Saunders uses these encounters—not so much to excavate an individual’s sense of loss as to connect it to a more national state of disarray. 1862, after all, was the height of the Civil War, when the outcome was far from assured. Lincoln was widely seen as being out of his depth, “a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Among Saunders’ most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that “the swiftest halt to the [war] (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest.” This is a hard truth, insisting that brutality now might save lives later, and it gives this novel a bitter moral edge. For those familiar with Saunders’ astonishing short fiction, such complexity is hardly unexpected, although this book is a departure for him stylistically and formally; longer, yes, but also more of a collage, a convocation of voices that overlap and argue, enlarging the scope of the narrative. It is also ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us. Lincoln, after all, has become a shade now, like all the ghosts who populate this book. “Strange, isn’t it?” one character reflects. “To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors utterly forgotten?”
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9534-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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