An engaging and surprising tale of transformation, told in almost allegorical form, perfect for fans of second chances and...
A middle-aged man travels from Iceland to an unnamed, war-torn country with plans of committing suicide.
Jónas Ebeneser has recently discovered that his adult daughter, Waterlily, is not his biological child. Considering his recently dissolved marriage and his lack of biological connection to his daughter, Jónas decides he has little left to live for. He begins planning his suicide but gets held up by logistics. First, he worries that disposing of his personal belongings will prove emotionally taxing for his daughter, so he begins emptying his home of his personal effects. Next, he concludes that his daughter should not be the one to find his body. So instead of shooting himself at home, Jónas decides to simply go away, disappear. He buys a plane ticket to a country that has just emerged from a devastating war on its own soil. Reserving a room at the mysterious Hotel Silence, he brings only one change of clothes, his diaries, and a tool box, in case affixing a hook to the ceiling might hasten his journey toward death. Ravaged by land mines, violence, and loss, the area surrounding Hotel Silence is a wasteland of dust and desperation. Jónas can’t help but notice the hotel’s glaring state of disrepair, and he begins using his tools to make small improvements, tightening a screw here, unclogging water pipes there. Word of Jónas’ handy nature spreads quickly, and he is suddenly being asked by all manner of folk to makes repairs for them in their homes and places of business around town. With so many men lost in the recent war, Jónas is treated as though he’s the only handyman in the entire country. People can’t get enough of him, and Jónas begins to wonder if he has found a new home. Told in surreal, almost Kafkaesque prose, Ólafsdóttir’s (Butterflies in November, 2014, etc.) stunning story is about one man’s unexpected reawakening.
An engaging and surprising tale of transformation, told in almost allegorical form, perfect for fans of second chances and evolving perspectives.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2750-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
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
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