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SIRACUSA

Name: SIRACUSA
Author: Delia Ephron
ISBN: 978-0-399-16521-4

by Delia Ephron ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2016

As the clues pile up, the coming storm is expertly foreshadowed—but when it arrives, it's utterly surprising.

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A sojourn in a Sicilian village sorely tests the relationships of two couples.

Ephron’s fourth novel is clearly being told in retrospect by each of the four middle-aged tourists whose lives have exploded in a manner not revealed until the end. It starts innocuously enough, as an ironic travelogue about American sophisticates abroad, first in Rome and then in the ancient coastal town of Siracusa. Finn and Taylor, from Portland, Maine, and their Botticelli-blonde 10-year-old, Snow, are traveling with their New York friends Lizzie, a magazine writer, and her novelist husband, Michael. Finn, a restaurateur, and Lizzie had a fling years ago that still resonates with each of them. Taylor, an heiress who dabbles in the tourism industry, is mainly concerned about Snow, who suffers from “extreme shyness syndrome.” Snow is captivated by Michael, who clearly knows how to flatter females of all ages. He’s currently enmeshed in an affair with a younger woman, Kath, a hostess at his and Lizzie’s favorite Italian eatery back home. Lizzie chalks Michael’s aloofness up to his novel in progress based on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. From Rome, Michael frantically texts and emails Kath, receiving no response. None, that is, until the group arrives in Siracusa and Kath turns up at their hotel, ostensibly by coincidence. By this time Michael had given up on Kath and Lizzie was heartened by her husband’s renewed attentiveness. The situation begins to resemble a Ford Madox Ford novel, with each narrator recounting and interpreting the same encounters from vastly differing perspectives. Finn resents Michael for his casual callousness toward Lizzie, Michael is torn between two women. (Under duress, he buys Kath a gaudy ring.) Taylor detests their no-star hotel, and Lizzie fails to suspect anything even when she sees Kath wearing a man’s shirt identical to Michael’s and carrying a copy of The Red and the Black.

As the clues pile up, the coming storm is expertly foreshadowed—but when it arrives, it's utterly surprising.

Pub Date: July 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-399-16521-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Blue Rider Press

Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LEFT ON TENTH
by Delia Ephron

- BOOK REVIEW
SISTER MOTHER HUSBAND DOG
by Delia Ephron

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LION IS IN
by Delia Ephron

- PROFILES
Delia Ephron

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
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.