An enthralling generational novel, the first in ten years from this Danish-American author (The Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1990, etc.), vividly reflects both the contemporary interest in researching family history and the haunting reconstructions of the past that distinguish the popular fiction of Denmark’s Peter H—eg. But Leffland’s rich novel is an impressively original work: a dark tapestry woven from the histories of a family’s several generations seen on crucial occasions that are separated by two centuries. In the approximate present day, middle-aged siblings Paula and Philip shake off their solipsism—he’s a weary, thrice-divorced American businessman, she a would-be sculptor living alone in the Swiss Jura Mountains—to seek information about the father (—the engineer—) they scarcely knew. A century earlier, their Danish grandparents, wealthy Holger and Grethe Rosted, blissfully indulge their mutual passion and separate avocations (he paints, she translates Zola)—until an overmastering sorrow for the victims of the modern age’s European wars (her grandfather, most specifically, who died young at the battle of Leipzig) awakens in Grethe the strain of madness that afflicts her family. Its source is found in the story of Grethe’s great-grandfather Thorkild, a dwarfish “Counselor” (onetime “financial advisor to the king”) whose intemperate rages and inexhaustible vitality together propel him on an odyssey to postwar Germany to seek and, in a series of brilliantly staged hallucinations, find the only human he has ever loved: his dead son. Excepting Philip, whose midlife crisis is, simply, dull, Leffland’s several protagonists emerge with stunning clarity, thanks largely to a simple, ingenious narrative device: they’re shown from the partially comprehending viewpoints of minor figures (including Grethe’s beloved housecat Olaf) who only incidentally cross their paths. The pages that convey Counselor Thorkild’s mingled hatred for “the rot that is humanity!” and instinctual lust for life vibrate with emotional force and psychological complexity. He’s an amazing creation in this, Leffland’s best novel yet.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-14271-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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