Sparse, rawboned and fascinating.
A spare, cunningly ironic novel set in the wilds of medieval Iceland.
While Iceland has been nominally Christianized, hibernal adversity and distance from the mainland have conspired to turn the native population toward a more primitive, primeval (read “debauched, pagan”) existence. The novel begins with an archbishop’s official directive to Bishop Insulomontanus in which he lays out what the bishop must do: to “investigate the Christian folk…and to offer them the comfort of the Word, while not neglecting to castigate sin, if need be, by sword or by fire.” The bishop takes this advice literally, and much of the rest of the novel consists of his report back to the archbishop about what he has done to reassert Christian order and hegemony. After an arduous journey through ice and snow, the bishop arrives at Gardar in New Thule to discover ten recently slaughtered corpses. The local chieftain, Einar Sokkason, is of no help, nor is the one remaining priest, a “porcine monster” living openly with a “scarce-pubescent female.” The bishop wastes no time with his first decision: to have the priest burned at the stake for “heresy, apostasy, sacrilege and sodomy.” In his continual struggle against heresy amongst these primordial people, the bishop resorts to increasingly desperate and even sadistic strategies to maintain his ecclesiastical authority, including having ears torn off and eyes gouged out as punishment for apostates. (He also resorts to beheading, which, considering the alternatives, is something of a blessing.) Eventually the bishop develops a sexual relationship with a local woman, Avarana, although he disingenuously hints in his report to the archbishop that she is a liar and thus not to be trusted. The occasional intervention of a third-person narrative puts the bishop’s growing derangement and hypocrisy into perspective.
Sparse, rawboned and fascinating.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58567-920-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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