Intense and immediate as a late-night conversation between lovers, this should draw readers to the bestselling Gavalda.
Gavalda (stories: I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, 2004, etc.) offers up a minimalist first novel as compelling as it is slight.
Chloe, the mother of two young daughters, has just learned that her husband, Adrien, is leaving her for another woman. Over the protests of her mother-in-law, Suzanne, her heretofore remote father-in-law, Pierre, bundles the shaken Chloe and children into his car and drives them from Paris to his country house. Chloe is raw and desperate. It’s the first time she has been alone with her father-in-law, until now distant and undemonstrative. At the house, she still feels fragile, uncertain, suspended, but Pierre shops and cooks for her, serving her his finest wines. The two develop an unexpected intimacy, and the latter part of the story consists mostly of a dialogue between them. Chloe describes her pain, and he tells her about his own affairs, and about the moment when his wife confronted him but confessed she was too fond of the comforts his income brought to leave him. He tells her of Mathilde, the translator he met in Hong Kong and was involved with for years. He describes how he might have left Suzanne for Mathilde if it hadn’t been for his secretary, whose husband left her around that time, transforming a dependable employee into a distraught woman. He reveals to Chloe that watching his secretary suffer this betrayal convinced him that he should stick with his wife and family rather than cause a breakup. In retrospect, he has regrets. Clearly, he is vicariously aware that Chloe and Adrien are setting forth on the path he never had the courage to take. “I would rather see you suffer a lot today than suffer a little bit for the rest of your life,” he tells Chloe.
Intense and immediate as a late-night conversation between lovers, this should draw readers to the bestselling Gavalda.Pub Date: April 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-594-48041-9
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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