Ambitious and intelligent but overstuffed.
Bajo’s debut is a complicated stew: a hyper-literary erotic suspense novel about a mathematician/sexual athlete/compulsive runner searching for his lover, who’s left him to unravel the mystery of her disappearance using only the books she’s bequeathed him.
Philip Masryk, recently divorced for the second time and living alone in Philadelphia, is something of a savant, and he uses his semi-mystical (and entertaining) theories to decipher the messages encoded in Irma’s library—351 volumes, ranging from a pulp western to Cervantes to Borges to Marguerite Duras, and including five (largely autobiographical) books by Irma herself. Throughout, Philip finds himself teased, winked at, manipulated—through Irma’s own fiction, her interpolated notes in the texts of others, elaborately faked additions, numerological traps, and more. He gets entangled with a translator named Lucia, a doppelgänger for Irma, who between bouts of spirited lovemaking spurs and cajoles him—and who seems, more and more, to be enmeshed in Irma’s web herself. It turns out that omnisexual Irma has been conducting affairs with every principal in the book—not only Philip but both ex-wives, his stepdaughter and his stepson, who takes off for Spain to find her, with Philip close behind. It’s an intriguing setup, and the book succeeds best while praising the pleasures of reading, in the way it captures the feeling one gets, in a good book, that wherever one looks there is some residue of amazing design. Wittily allusive, it offers offbeat readings of works like Don Quixote as well as disquisitions on everything from Spanish urban geography to bird’s-nest soup to bookbinding to steeplechase. But despite flashes of promise, the book doesn’t coalesce. The sex scenes are comically overlush and overearnest, and Irma remains a cipher, less a genuine mystery than the focus of strenuous mystification: “I think she is the most remarkable thing on this earth. She keeps herself free, Philip…She lives by what she learns and she learns by feeling.”
Ambitious and intelligent but overstuffed.Pub Date: June 23, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01929-8
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
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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