Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.
An omnibus of short-short fiction by sometimes-playful, sometimes-pensive avant-gardist Williams (Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, 2016, etc.).
Talk about economy of expression: This book clocks in at just shy of 800 pages and yet contains more than 300 short stories. At their best and most evocative, these stories are something between fairy tale and vignette, as with “Girl with a Pencil,” which suggests that the child is mother to the woman by means of art and storytelling: “And so was invented a kind of brute—a brunette with longish hair, who must love her enemies—who acts responsibly.” As Ben Marcus notes in a foreword, the mystery in Williams’ work often lies in the transitions, which we take to mean the largely unspoken connections from paragraph to paragraph. “All I remember is our kinship, which makes me sick,” says the narrator of a story scarcely more than a couple of hundred words long. “I have gone so very far to deny death.” She adds, after a beat and a paragraph break, “It is already only a memory.” What “it” refers to could be any number of antecedents, attaching each of which to the pronoun changes the story ever so slightly. It’s a nice trick, one that doesn’t boast. So is the close of a somber story that leaves one wondering at what the real ending might be: “I am angry toward the end of the day, but you won’t have to find out much about that.” Elsewhere the connections are unspoken even within paragraphs: “He stumbled. He fell down. I might have struck him, that’s why,” runs one paragraph in its entirety. There’s Laurel and Hardy slapstick in there—and menace, too. Although a couple of the more Dada-ish moments don’t quite work and a couple of puns (“I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted”) seem forced, it’s altogether a pleasure for readers attentive to both language and story.
Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-982-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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