An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.
A pensive, provocative novel of history, memory, and our endlessly blood-soaked times by one of the foremost writers to have emerged from the former Yugoslavia.
“Andreas Ban feeds himself with other people’s lives on his journey towards death, that most powerful goddess of ultimate oblivion,” writes Croatian novelist Drndic (Leica Format, 2015, etc.). Ban has retreated from psychological practice after finally despairing of figuring people out, has retreated from writing after running out of things to say, but he has not stopped visiting the past. Once familiar with every corner of Paris and New York, he now lives in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast, slowly falling apart and, in his disintegration, quite obviously hastening toward death; now he is living with memories, recalling “old friendships, dead loves, abandoned towns, books, books, real and unreal characters….” As he remembers, as he sifts through all those books and his files, he makes one troubling connection after another. An exile from the town dreams of murdering his father, who in turn has taken part in the murder of its Jews, all of which, remembering, Ban cannot corroborate because everyone involved is long dead; a superb director whose films he admires turns out to have made a hateful pro-Nazi film during the war, then, soon after, a socialist-realist homage to Yugoslavia’s Communist regime without missing a step; and so on. “How can it be, one minute this, the next that?” It is all enough to drive Ban to distraction, along with his steadily dissolving vertebrae and what he is sure is a lurking cancer. There are remedies: he can stop thinking, stop remembering, stop accumulating odd bits of knowledge on the shape of ears, the habits of lobsters, depression among zoo animals, and so on, and slip away. Or he can take matters into his own hands, whence the title of Drndic’s book, which, though somber, ends on an unexpectedly hopeful note.
An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2721-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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