SOMEDAY WE'LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING

Name: SOMEDAY WE'LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING
Author: Daniela Krien
ISBN: 978-1-62365-084-1

by Daniela Krien ; translated by Jamie Bulloch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 2, 2014

Timed with the political and cultural momentum of East Germany’s dissolution, this deceptively elegant story reveals great...

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Dense and descriptive, this debut coming-of-age tale is set against the fascinating background of German reunification.

It's the summer of 1990, and the Berlin Wall has just come down, but in the countryside of East Germany, life remains largely unchanged since the war. Sixteen-year-old Maria is living with her boyfriend, Johannes Brendel, at his family’s house, one of the two independent farmsteads remaining in the area. The Brendels are successful farmers and accepting of wayward Maria, who has stopped going to school and made herself at home on the farm. She occasionally lends a hand but mostly reads The Brothers Karamazov and makes love with Johannes. Down the road, Henner’s farm is unkempt and wild, like Henner himself. He lives there alone and is known to drink to excess. The simplicity of Maria’s narration reveals her cleareyed awareness of those around her. Members of the Brendel family become plain as day with economic, descriptive grace. But despite her awareness and the stories she tells of her past—absentee father, ineffectual mother, the “honor” of attending a strict communist summer camp—Maria’s inner landscape, and her future, are unknown territories. She and Henner are drawn to each other with a blinding strength, and their collision and resulting affair are complicated and passionate. Maria fears and craves Henner; he in turn ranges from gentle to beastly. Their need for each other is absolute, even if the reasons behind it remain a mystery. The juxtaposition of Maria’s personal turmoil with the broader changes in the way of life around her pulls an unyielding line of tension throughout the novel.

Timed with the political and cultural momentum of East Germany’s dissolution, this deceptively elegant story reveals great emotional and cultural upheaval.

Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-62365-084-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Mobius

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL 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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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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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.