Charmingly taut fiction that occasionally cries out for broader canvases.
Fifty ultra-brief stories by the Slovenian writer that revel in absurdity and pointed ironies. This is his second collection (Skinswaps, 1998) translated into English.
No piece is longer than four pages, and many are only a paragraph or two. The fiction is driven more by aphorisms, jokes and paradoxes than storytelling—readers of Lydia Davis’ fiction will be familiar with the technique. But Blatnik has a knack for wringing insight and meaning out of such concision, and he occasionally places stories with similar themes next to each other to exploit their resonances. “One,” in which a man imagines an animal sleeping next to him, is followed by “Say That,” about picking up a girl in a bar, which is followed by “Separation,” in which a man wakes up in a strange woman’s bed. In this trio and elsewhere, the theme is isolation; Blatnik is concerned with how our feelings of security are challenged while we’re alone. He writes skillfully in a variety of tones. “Experts” is a slice of political satire in which PR pros discuss promoting a war; “Home From XpanD” compresses into five lines a joke about cultural consumers literally being consumed; and “Cracks” is a mini horror story, evoking the feeling of dread that strikes a man who hits a child with his car in the night. At his most experimental, Blatnik can be downright cubist: “In Passing,” for instance, deploys a series of clipped, staccato sentences to capture a rock flying through the window of a moving train. The stories’ chief flaw is that their brevity usually means that the stakes aren’t very high for his characters—even when the subject matter is serious, Blatnik doesn’t afford himself the space to give them much gravitas. (And the characters are typically nameless, which exacerbates the feeling.) The two pages of “Spinning,” which describe a man who’s panic-struck about his entire future after a botched DJ gig, are nicely turned, but the reader can’t help but wonder what Blatnik might do with the story in five pages, or even ten.
Charmingly taut fiction that occasionally cries out for broader canvases.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56478-599-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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