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THE SAINT OF INCIPIENT INSANITIES

Name: THE SAINT OF INCIPIENT INSANITIES
Author: Elif Shafak
ISBN: 0-374-25357-9

by Elif Shafak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004

Sometimes lively and provocative, but frequently as pretentious as Gail’s spiritually shaped chocolates.

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A first English translation from Turkish author Shafak follows the lives of three foreign students in Boston to explore community and alienation while playing with ideas about language, religion, and culture.

Arriving from Turkey to work on his Ph.D. in political science, Omer moves into a house with Piyu, a Spanish dental student, and Abed, a Moroccan studying biotechnology. Unlike the Catholic, hot-chocolate-drinking Piyu and the Moslem, mint-tea-drinking Abed, who both remain devout, Omer, who drinks coffee and liquor and listens to American music nonstop, no longer practices Islam. Despite their differences in culture and language, the three men’s outsider status (as well as their common reliance on English as a second language) binds them together while each struggles to find where he resides in spirit. They play word games and take care of their dog. They eat wonderful meals prepared by Piyu’s Mexican-American girlfriend Alegre, a secret bulimic whose gorging and disgorging is described in painful detail. Alegre widens their social circle by adding Waspy Debra Ellen Thompson from her eating disorders therapy group and Debra’s former lover Gail, half-Jewish and highly neurotic, with whom Debra runs a candy business, Squirmy Spirit Chocolates (an odd inconsistency, since they are vegans, and the chocolates described sound buttery rich). Abed’s mother comes to visit, bringing a disappointing letter from his Moroccan girlfriend, and Abed is surprised how well she adjusts to his American friends. In fact, she suggests that Abed marry Gail. Instead, Omer and Gail fall in love, a union of Omer’s internal anger and Gail’s deep sadness. They marry, but Gail’s depression will conquer their connection. Throughout, the characters talk about philosophy and sociology, although they skirt thornier political issues, while Shafak’s use of language veers from masterful to awkwardly convoluted.

Sometimes lively and provocative, but frequently as pretentious as Gail’s spiritually shaped chocolates.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-374-25357-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES
by Elif Shafak

- BOOK REVIEW
10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD
by Elif Shafak

- BOOK REVIEW
THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE
by Elif Shafak

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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.