A splendid debut that promises great things to come.
An Ojibwe writer from northern Minnesota's Leech Lake Reservation debuts with a sad but graceful tale of seven people living in a crumbling housing tract called Poverty.
The first 25 or so pages on the desecration of the Mississippi River and the people's land may be some of the most depressing ever written, and it takes a little effort to wade through them. It's worth it, though, as the novel then unfolds with delicate human insight and engaging drama. ``Poverty'' is the Kennedy-era housing tract in the corner of the Minnesota reservation. The tract is in a forested area where, long ago, twins Duke and Ellis built a cabin with their pregnant teenage girlfriend, Jeannette. Now in their 70s, Duke and Ellis live in a Pontiac Catalina parked outside the house where Jeannette lives with daughter Celia and Celia's boyfriend, Stan, a Vietnam vet. Also in the house is the six- fingered and mostly silent Little, Celia's son (the father's identity is one of the central dramas here), as well as Donovan, whom the twins found half-frozen in a car crashed nearby. In Poverty's second house live Stan's sister Violet their father is in prison, their mother fled the reservation long ago and her daughter, Jackie. The unique bonds these people have to each other are revealed as each character tells his or her story: Stan recounts the night in Vietnam when his best friend was killed; Jeannette her tale of being taken to Iowa as a young girl to serve as maid servant to two elderly white women; and Donovan reveals how Little, brimming with excitement, climbed above Poverty and to his death. This clan forms an odd but tightly knit unit that faces numerous deaths, rapes of people and of their land and other hardships, transcending them all. They claim Poverty, and poverty, as theirs, transforming it into a place of beauty that perhaps only they can recognize.
A splendid debut that promises great things to come.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55597-231-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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