Provocative and entertaining: a thoughtful addition to this timeless tale.
An ambitious sequel to one of the canon’s greatest epics.
Likening his first foray into epic poetry as what “the Odyssey, we might say, is to the Iliad,” liturgical author (A User’s Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, 2005) and Episcopal priest Webber introduces his saga with a boast worthy of the heroic subject. The author picks up where Beowulf leaves off: namely, in the wake of the warrior’s triumphant victories over Grendel and the dragon. The story now turns to a society redefining itself without its hero; the Geats anxiously look to the future, fearing that enemies once held at bay by their heroic leader’s mere existence will soon capitalize on their vulnerability. Only two of the original characters survive in the sequel: Beowulf, by reputation alone, and Wiglaf, a distant relative who was the sole warrior brave enough to stand with him in his mortal combat with the dragon. Wiglaf somewhat reluctantly becomes the Geats’ new leader and faces many of the same issues challenging modern leaders–most notably, whether to preempt possible attacks by striking first, or to attempt a peaceful coexistence. The pacifistic Wiglaf opts for the latter, thus spurring the Geats’ mass migration from Scandinavia to Britain, but not before encountering numerous confrontations, some with the more warlike in his clan who claim that “ ‘peace has poisoned [them].’ ” The plot is believable, the themes compelling (if a bit didactic) and the author’s attention to the structural dimensions of the original poem–limiting the number of metrical stresses per line; frequent alliteration–admirable.
Provocative and entertaining: a thoughtful addition to this timeless tale.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-37358-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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