Confusing at times, disturbing at others, Peters’s work rewards the challenge of reading with lasting, moody reflections.
German novel about a sculptor who may have witnessed a murder reveals a disturbing, hallucinatory world in which perception is as fluid as blood.
Albin, a young sculptor, is not having a good time. Coerced into vacationing in Turkey with his live-in girlfriend Livia and a group of her friends, he’s drinking too much and watching their relationship disintegrate. Livia, a photographer, knows her boyfriend is deteriorating, and so when he tells her that he has seen a man shot by an unseen assailant on a neighboring hotel’s balcony, she doesn’t know what to believe. She’s focused on her art, which shows her life’s downsides and features the carcasses of dead dogs and goats. Livia is unsure about how much life is left in her relationship with Albin, who is barely functioning in the present. The child of an abusive, alcoholic father, he flashes back to childhood memories in which he dissociates: “Mother” becomes “the petite woman” as he watches her beaten and raped, while his own abuse is blanked out. “Your brother ran into a tree,” his mother explains to his siblings. “I was lying on a bench. . . . My shirt was covered in blood.” Countering these heated images, and the mystery of the murder, are the reserved observations of their colleague Olaf. Another narrator, Olaf, recounts in a straightforward manner what the rest of their small group has to say. “This sculptor and his photographer girlfriend—if you ask me, Olaf, they’re through with each other.” But although Olaf’s narrative seems logical, the concrete viewpoint in this story of shifting realities, his view of events is incomplete: “What did Albin do in Düsünülen Yer?” he asks. “We never succeeded in finding out.” People disappear and lives go on, but unsettling shadows haunt them all.
Confusing at times, disturbing at others, Peters’s work rewards the challenge of reading with lasting, moody reflections.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-51447-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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