Pretentious and silly.
A messy, over-the-top thriller set in postwar Berlin.
A pimp, a whore, a midget and a soldier in a mink coat propel the plot of this first novel from Cambridge-educated Vyleta. The soldier is an epicene brute, a grotesquely fat British colonel called Fosko; he has a secret fact-gathering operation and uses torture. He gets wind of a wily German midget, Söldmann, who trades information on the black market and frequents a brothel run by an American, Boyd. Fosko, promising a British passport, induces a desperate young German woman, Sonia, to go work for Boyd and spy on the midget. Söldmann does indeed have an immensely valuable microfilm. Fosko has him killed. Boyd dumps the dead midget on his best friend, Pavel; soon after Fosko has Boyd tortured and killed, but the microfilm is missing. Thus Pavel enters the story. He claims he’s an American citizen, son of a German-Jewish father and a Russian mother, but who knows for sure? He’s an enigma, a gentle man who kills ruthlessly when he must and inspires devotion. Sonia the whore, who by now is Fosko’s mistress and living next door, falls for him big time. So does Anders, the young gang member looking for a surrogate father. Even Peterson, Fosko’s one-eyed torture guy and the “I” of the title, comes to love him like a brother. All this happens around Christmas 1946. Berlin is bitter cold. Its poverty is abject. Underneath their tough-guy exteriors, Vyleta’s characters are quietly weepy, except for Fosko, who sings a Christmas carol as he strips a Russian corpse (the Russkis want that microfilm too); the man is so vile you know the author has a horrible end planned for him. The story, clumsily told, moves in fits and starts, doubles back on itself and switches viewpoints recklessly, bringing us no closer to understanding Pavel.
Pretentious and silly.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-451-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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