by Brooks Hansen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2003
Gloriously imagined—though with a rather low narrative temperature—with its spooky, dramatic detail giving it a feverish...
An exotic locale, its fabled history, and the latter years of dethroned Napoleon Bonaparte are the colorful core materials of this intriguing third outing from Hansen (after Perlman’s Ordeal, 1999, etc.).
Hansen begins with two terse prologues disclosing the volcanic origin of the island of St. Helena (in the South Atlantic, off the western coast of Africa), and the history of its forlorn earliest inhabitant Fernao Lopez, a Portuguese soldier who had betrayed his superiors during a 16th-century campaign in search of the eastern kingdom of the legendary Prester John. The figure of “the monster” Lopez (so called because he was brutally mutilated as well as banished) blends, three centuries later, in the islanders’ minds with that of the exile Bonaparte, surrounded by his British captors and French coterie, housed with a wealthy merchant family, the Balcombes. The slender plot centers on accommodations made for and by the visiting Emperor, and especially in his unconventional friendship with 14-year-old Betsy Balcombe, a spirited, willful girl who clearly perceives the fallen leader’s intelligence and kindness as well as his weaknesses. We’re taken, to varying degrees, into the thoughts of such other characters as Bonaparte’s docile “amanuensis” Las Cases and dour tutor Virgil Huffington (who experiences a vision that motivates his abortive plan to help Napoleon escape). But most of the supporting players are shadowy, with the glorious exceptions of the Balcombes’ slave gardener Toby, deeply attuned to the island’s natural rhythms and folk culture; and the shadow of Fernao Lopez, glimpsed in dreams and as a passing ghostly presence, finally elegized—long after the Emperor, his retinue and hosts, and the mixed races of servants who attend them have passed on—as “the only one [the island] keeps with her.”
Gloriously imagined—though with a rather low narrative temperature—with its spooky, dramatic detail giving it a feverish intensity.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27019-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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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