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THE LAKE

Name: THE LAKE
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
ISBN: 978-1-933633-77-0

by Banana Yoshimoto & translated by Michael Emmerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2011

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The simplicity of this elliptical novel’s form and expression belies its emotional depth.

There’s almost an artistic sleight of hand in the latest from Yoshimoto (Hardboiled & Hard Luck, 2005, etc.), a novel in which nothing much seems to happen yet everything changes. Its narrator is a young Japanese woman, a graphic artist and muralist, on the cusp of 30 but still a relative innocent. She finds herself at a turning point, mourning the recent death of her mother, a death that spurs the daughter to uproot herself from her hometown and pursue her career amid the depersonalized anonymity of Tokyo. She takes an apartment, which offers a view of another apartment where a young man her age lives. “I had a habit of standing at my window, looking out, and so did Nakajima, so we noticed each other, and before long we started exchanging nods,” she explains in the matter-of-fact prose that marks the narrative style. Nods lead to more expansive forms of voiceless communication, which leads the two to meet, which leads to love. Or something. “It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness,” she writes of her feeling for the man she discovers is a haunted, frail medical student. “Like the feeling you get when you realize that, in the grand scheme of things, your time here on this earth really isn’t that long after all.” As the two bond over their dead mothers, she intuits that there are levels to his life and history that she can barely fathom. She gets a glimpse deeper into his soul when they make a pilgrimage to the lake of the title, to visit friends of his, a very mysterious brother and sister, whom she later suspects might not exist at all. The narrator and her lover bond in a way that isn’t necessarily sexual and not exactly spiritual, but more “as if we were clinging to each other, he and I, at the edge of a cliff.” At one point the narrator feels like she is “inhabiting someone else’s dream,” which is the sort of effect the reader might experience as well.

Pub Date: May 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-933633-77-0

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Melville House

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PREMONITION
by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated by Asa Yoneda

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAD-END MEMORIES
by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated by Asa Yoneda

- BOOK REVIEW
HARDBOILED & HARD LUCK
by Banana Yoshimoto & translated by Michael Emmerich

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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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.