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THE SOVEREIGN

Name: THE SOVEREIGN
Author: Andrew Elias Colarusso
ISBN: 978-1-94315-0-106

by Andrew Elias Colarusso ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 2017

Readers with a taste for literary experimentalism and the Caribbean diaspora may take interest in Colarusso’s effort.

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Magical realism makes its way to Puerto Rico tinged with surrealism, post-realism, postmodernism, and even a little technospeak.

What happens when an ant ports a fungus into the colony, or when people merely trying to get to city from suburb have to put up with the anti-social barfing of an underage drunk on a train? “We are still sitting impatiently in the dark,” a harried rider remarks in a moment that might serve as the thesis for Colarusso’s overstuffed debut novel, mostly set in a Puerto Rico that does not entirely correspond to the real one. There, though an American territory whose residents are citizens, sort of, military drones ply the air like obscene birds of night, piloted from afar by career soldiers disconnected from the damage they do. One of whom, half borriqueño himself, is as much an artist of the joystick—“To watch Miguel play was something like watching a nervous portrait or a score to the music of his friend’s mind,” he recalls of a Game Boy mentor—as his rebel foe, a lieutenant named Frances Villegas, is an artist of the keyboard. “This is my song, Coronel. It brings me joy even if I don’t play well by your standards,” she tells her comandante, aware that a drone may interrupt the recital at any minute. For their part, the members of the Evangelist Insurrection, determined to shake off U.S. rule, are willing to do just about anything to gain the island’s freedom, scorched earth and all. But what might happen if they succeed? It’s one of many conditionals in a narrative that takes in brujeria, Santeria, négritude, and GlaxoSmithKline. Some of the manuscript seems an exercise in grad school style, some a dark here and playful there recasting of Caribbean history; Vonnegut would be at home in some passages, Junot Díaz in others, and if the story itself seems to fly off in different directions at times, the memorable characters, particularly the much-put-upon Malou, help keep things on track.

Readers with a taste for literary experimentalism and the Caribbean diaspora may take interest in Colarusso’s effort.

Pub Date: May 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-94315-0-106

Page Count: 361

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.