A dismal farrago that illuminates neither character nor sexuality.
The kinky sex business in pre-Hitler Germany spawns a suspicious death in a murky novel by Swedish author Knisch that often reads more like a treatise than a thriller.
It’s the summer of 1928 in an unnamed city that is evidently Berlin. The narrator, 29-year-old Sascha Knisch, moved there a few years earlier from his hometown, Vienna; he’s a part-time projectionist at a movie theater. Sascha is also a transvestite who makes regular visits to Dora Wilms, who’s a softer version of a dominatrix. Their current session is interrupted by the doorbell. Sascha, dressed as a schoolgirl, hides in the closet. He later emerges to find the visitor gone and Dora dead. That’s the setup, but don’t expect a suspenseful narrative. For most of the novel Dora is alive, in flashbacks; we don’t learn until almost the end whether she died of natural causes. What’s front and center is the “sexual question,” by which Fioretos means the “obscure drives” that shape sexual identities. For Sascha the key moment came in a high-school art class, when Sascha was the model and his fellow students, prompted by their teacher, drew him as a woman. Dora’s past involved exhibitionism, sex with her brother, a teenage pregnancy and a baby given up for adoption. Their interests take them to the Foundation for Sexual Research, where they learn about the “grey sex” and the wondrous properties of semen and testicles. Periodically Fioretos returns to the investigation, while adding complications. Is some missing film the key to Dora’s death? Is Sascha’s best friend Anton, a porn filmmaker, playing a double game? What is the significance of the Brotherhood, a band of vigilantes? A final difficulty: Fioretos wrote his novel in his native Swedish. His own translation leads to some awkward locutions (e.g., “my heart inched up a few notches.”)
A dismal farrago that illuminates neither character nor sexuality.Pub Date: March 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58567-957-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rookery/Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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