THE PARTHENON BOMBER

Name: THE PARTHENON BOMBER
Author: Christos Chrissopoulos
ISBN: 978-1-59051-836-6

by Christos Chrissopoulos ; translated by John Cullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017

Reminiscent of a half-century–old ancestor, Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel Z, in its sardonic protest of things as they are.

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You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone: thus this slender but deeply charged novella concerning an unspeakable—but sadly imaginable—act of terrorism.

“He keeps to himself, we don’t see him often. He doesn’t socialize like everyone else and rarely speaks.” So, inevitably, says one of his neighbors after a 21-year-old Athenian known only as Ch.K. (“only his initials were released to the public”) blows up the crowning achievement of classical Greek architecture, the Parthenon. Ch.K.’s logic is impeccable, after a fashion: the building is so beautiful, so powerful a testament to a civilization superior to the Greek present, that it forces Athenians to cast their eyes downward at their grimy, dirty city, “and that puts us into a bad mood, because she’s unworthy of It, and no matter what we do, we will never become worthy of such a masterpiece.” One can read Ch.K. as a nihilistic heir of Albert Camus’ antihero Meursault, or one can see in Chrissopoulos’ plainspoken tale, told as a multipart procedural, an extended metaphor for the decline of Greece as a poor stepchild to the European Union, overrun by refugees and mired in apathy. Naturally, like Mohamed Atta and company, Ch.K. sees grandeur in his act of destruction, a dare turned into deed: if everything in Athens “looks evanescent,” as he proclaims, then how much more permanent a bomb crater will seem, something to shake the bourgeoisie to their core and rattle every window around. The state, naturally, has other ideas, and if some of the interviewees quietly agree that Athens truly did not live up to its wondrous past, that won’t stop a few things from happening, one of them the construction of a “New Parthenon” scheduled to go up in months rather than centuries.

Reminiscent of a half-century–old ancestor, Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel Z, in its sardonic protest of things as they are.

Pub Date: June 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-59051-836-6

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.