Overattenuated and underimagined. The author of See Under: Love (1989) can do better than this.
An “affair” conducted through the correspondence between two unhappily married would-be lovers is the subject of this brooding fifth novel from the accomplished Israeli author.
It begins shortly after Yair, a rare-book dealer, has encountered Miriam, a schoolteacher, at their high school reunion. He writes importunately to her, gradually revealing details of his miserable youth (as the child of abusive parents), dull marriage and conflicted fatherhood, and deep emotional neediness, citing as precedents the letters Flaubert exchanged with his mistress Louise Colet and, more pointedly, Kafka’s letters to his estranged soulmate Milena Jesenska (these latter provide the source of Grossman’s title: Kafka’s declaration that “love is that you are my knife with which I dig deeply into myself”). Yair’s “half” of their correspondence, which occupies fully two thirds of the novel, is filled with redundant vacillations between self-justification and self-hatred, and considerable rhetorical overkill (“I suddenly jump and expose the armpits of my soul to you in an obscene striptease”). By the time we get Miriam’s reactions to all this (recorded in her “notebook,” and also expressed in her final letter to him—the only one the reader ever sees), we’ve long since lost interest in either Yair’s connubial problems or Miriam’s struggles with her emotionally disturbed son and inhibiting past, not to mention a nagging conscience. In a brief final section, Grossman presents each character’s participation in, and later reactions to, an exchange of phone calls, in which they effectively dare each other to cut the ties that bind them elsewhere, and be together—and wraps it up with a genuinely dramatic surprise ending. Too little, too late. The novel’s considerable technical sophistication aside, even the most willing reader will find it difficult to empathize with these literate whiners.
Overattenuated and underimagined. The author of See Under: Love (1989) can do better than this.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-29977-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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