Another woebegone childhood propels this thin mix of style and attitude. Like medieval mendicants parading their wounds for alms, the authors of triste contes such as this one avidly flourish their deepest misfortunes—abuse, incest, suicide, less-than-perfect relatives—as if suffering alone were reason enough for a book. These disjointed recollections of the author's sad, nasty family are, ultimately, too familiar. It is a given that novelist Morin (Lampshades, not reviewed), a weekly columnist for England's The Spectator, does not like her parents, especially ``Fuckwit,'' her lumpen, passively offensive father. And her relatives are all pathetic and disgusting saps. Friends turn out badly. Melancholy is always threatening. Then there's the suicide of her beloved (perhaps too beloved) brother John, which provides as much of an overarching narrative as this book possesses: His death echoes across almost every page. If John were presented as a real person instead of a cardboard palimpsest for Morin's egocentric absorption, this could have been genuinely moving. But Morin seems incapable of the required level of empathy. When she runs out of familial miseries to exploit, she coughs up recherchÇ musings on style and the movies, trying to add a mythic, or at least ``glamorous,'' overlay to her unhappiness. We're treated to reflections on the blonde mystique, rehashed fanzine appreciations of Kim Novak, Montgomery Cliff, et al., and pensÇes on the intersections of cinema and life that are neither fresh nor startling. The most stylish thing here is Morin's prose, which has an occasional snap and crackle to it, unlike her affected pose of Catholic nihilism, rooted in the misguided notions that cynicism is easy and that salvation is a byproduct of despair, rather than its apotheosis. Style without substance, glamour without beauty, form without function.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87951-750-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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