Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.
A pair of eerie, minimalist novellas by the gifted Argentinean writer Aira (Ema the Captive, 2016, etc.).
Shades of The Twilight Zone and Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic blood baths linger over these two unnerving novellas, neither of which is anything like the other. In The Little Buddhist Monk, Aira introduces us to a diminutive but endlessly curious Korean monk who dreams of going to Europe or America. If there is a central motif to the work, it is a meditation on the nature of dreams. “Practical people say that dreams serve no purpose; but they can’t deny that at least they allow one to dream,” the monk muses, later remembering, “It costs nothing to dream.” In due course, the monk meets French photographer Napoleon Chirac and his cartoonist wife, Jacqueline Bloodymary, becoming their guide to the country’s shrines. It should come as no surprise to Aira’s readers that the monk, his dreams, and indeed his very reality turn out to be not what they appear. The follow-up novella, The Proof, finds Aira back in more familiar territory with a story set in Buenos Aires, but its conclusion is no less shocking. The story seems designed to shock, as two punk-rock lesbians brace timid Marcia in the street with a startling query, “Wannafuck?” In trying to figure out “Mao” and “Lenin,” Marcia finds herself enraptured in a dangerous game, as the two challenge and taunt her bourgeois assumptions about the world. “You are the nihilist,” Mao tells Marcia. “Could you really spend your time talking crap, worried about the kind of things that happen here, in this hamburger microcosm? All of this is accidental, nothing more than the springboard to launch us back to what is important.” By the time Marcia joins Mao and Lenin in launching a violent attack on a supermarket, she may or may not be experiencing Stockholm syndrome, but there’s no doubt she is fundamentally changed.
Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2112-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.
In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Station Eleven Miniseries to Star Mackenzie Davis
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
