Very literary, highly experimental and not very interesting to read all in a row.
Seventeen absurdist short stories from the land of the midnight sun.
It’s not clear whether this debut collection of Swedish-influenced short fiction from Merkner (Creative Writing/West Chester University) is meant to be parody, collage or dream diary, but all the stories are either weighty with loquaciousness or viciously abridged, which is often for the better. After opening with a long-winded farce about a pig, Merkner offers “Check the Baby,” about a man and his wife who have resorted to trading sexual favors for the right not to check on their newborn. “The stakes are not low, I might add,” he writes. “I have 4,027 blowjobs coming my way someday, it’s not exactly clear when, and my wife has roughly fourteen hours of French-style kissing.” “Local Accident” (widely available online if you need a sample) is about a woman whose hit-and-run accident causes her to lose her baby: “The fact is you don’t always choose your choices. You don’t always choose your victims and you don’t always choose your witnesses. That’s why we call them accidents.” Several stories concern themselves with the trials of parenthood, notably “When our Son, 26, Brings us His First Girlfriend” and “When our Son, 36, Asks us for What He Calls a Small Loan.” Other stories are about those things that divide us—the mute father in “O Sweet One in the Bluff” or the divorcé in “Cabins,” who discovers that he is not alone in his lonesomeness. Others are variations on long-held myths, like the title character of “The Cook at Swedish Castle.” The author clearly has some kind of affection for his oversized caricatures, and there are moments of humor throughout, but there’s a great deal of cynicism at play, too.
Very literary, highly experimental and not very interesting to read all in a row.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56689-338-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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