A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and...
Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators like Meursault and Oskar Matzerath.
In this first novel by Battersby (Ordinary Dogs: A Story of Two Lives, 2011, etc.), the literary correspondent for the Irish Times, Helen lives a charmed if lonely life of elite Southern privilege on her family's Richmond estate. Living amid her veterinarian father's thoroughbred-filled stables, she is kindly treated by her classmates but mostly friendless, wanting for nothing but emotionally disconnected from her arrogant, brooding father and frivolous, detached mother. When her mother is publicly shot by her crazed lover, Helen joins her father, who, like her, values animal companionship over human, in shrugging with bewilderment—and a touch of indifference—at her mother's violent and ignoble death. Helen is largely content to tend to her passions, science, art, and horses, until her father's beloved racehorse dies, leaving him awash in the bitterness and grief that failed to appear after his wife's murder; he denounces serious and disciplined Helen as a mere dilettante, bound not for a life of invention and discovery as the scientist she has always dreamed of becoming but that of a historian, an eternal observer. In disgust, she flees to Paris but, after a perilous incident with a loathsome stranger, regrets having chosen a city she'd never much cared about over Berlin, a place better suited to her character. Helen is saved from mounting self-loathing, despair, and aimlessness by an elderly lost dog who "wail[s] like a Confederate widow" and gives her a renewed sense of purpose. Her mission, to stay in Europe long enough to find a way to bring Hector back home to Richmond to die, leads her to a training yard in Amboise and to true passion, love, and sorrow.
A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-147-7
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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