Following his grim, medieval Morality Play (1995) with a more delicate modern work, Unsworth makes the most both of his Booker Prizewinning talents and the Italian countryside he now calls home to offer an homage to Umbria and a skewering of the motley multinational crew who've taken up residence there. The Chapmans are British; the Greens, American; Blemish, British; Ritter, German; Arturo and Fabio, from the south; Monti, from the north; while Mancini, like God, has no place of origin- -leaving the three Checchetti as the only ones with roots in the richer ocher of the Umbrian soil. But the locals are a conniving lot who approach the Chapmans to ask for reparation when the Chapmans' garden wall collapses into the road shared by all, blaming their expatriate neighbors' moving-truck traffic for the damage. As Cecilia and Harold consult their attorney, Mancini, the elderly Greens, who need to renovate their old farmhouse, are being hoodwinked by the lugubrious Blemish, who intends to fleece them for all they're worth as their ``project manager.'' Ritter, meanwhile, his interpreting career ending in a breakdown, is meticulously clearing his bramble-choked land, work that looses a flood of childhood memories of Rome, where his father was a Nazi intelligence officer in WW II. Fabio is about to be duped into turning over to Arturo the deed to the house he and Arturo have shared for 15 years, only because Arturo is now eager to be gone, while Monti, a professor of Italian history from Turin, loses himself in the regional intrigues spanning blood-soaked centuries after his wife leaves him. For one and all, moments of crisis prove cathartic, and more often than not, the ageless, serenely just Mancini has a hand in guiding the outcome. As if for just a change of pace, Unsworth offers this gentle sendup of the ongoing drive to colonize pastoral Italy. But the exquisitely evoked Umbrian landscape that serves as backdrop for these petty squabbles and personal dramas is the real draw here.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48651-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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