A sly collection of black riffs on overinflated egos, the false trap of genius, and the sad truth that many, many people...
Highly entertaining debut in which the worst composer in history hires perhaps the worst biographer in the business to write the story of his life.
Liner notes for failure are the dreamlike stuff Miller’s tale is made of. More in love with the idea of having one of his offspring become a musical prodigy than with the idea of creating beautiful music, Simon Silber’s father relentlessly drilled him in the piano from a ridiculously young age—creating, unfortunately, instead of a modern-day Beethoven, a cretinous sociopath whose utter lack of talent or inspiration failed ever to divert him from his aim of becoming a great composer. Ingeniously, Miller presents the novel as a set of liner notes for the “definitive” 4-CD set of recordings of Silber’s ungodly music. Written by one Norm Fayrewether, the notes only peripherally deal with the compositions but are used mainly as an excuse for Fayrewether to pontificate on his relationship with the composer, whom he equals in obstinate delusions about his own (absent) genius. While Fayrewether appreciates (and shares) Silber’s misanthropy, he makes very clear his contempt for the music—a more disturbing collection of impudent noise masquerading as avant-garde not being imaginable. Of “Helen,” he writes that “Silber told me once that he’d set out to write the ugliest possible piece of music that would still strike his sister as beautiful, and that he’d been appalled by just how ugly that turned out to be, so great was the gulf between his sense of beauty and hers.” Their relationship disastrous from the beginning, Fayrewether and Silber are a perfectly matched pair of pretentious poseurs who give Miller a fine time as he regales us with one tale after another, bursting bubbles of pomposity on every page.
A sly collection of black riffs on overinflated egos, the false trap of genius, and the sad truth that many, many people are—well, puffed-up mediocrities.Pub Date: May 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-14336-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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