Witty and alarming, a satire with (unexpected) heart.
Deeply weird and unsettlingly hilarious, Wilk’s dystopian debut pushes the grim absurdities of the present just a little bit further, into a near future that’s too plausible for comfort.
Anja and her boyfriend, Louis, live together, inconveniently but rent-free, on the side of an (artificial) mountain in an experimental zero-waste eco-colony—a welcome escape from Berlin’s skyrocketing rents. And yes, their house doesn’t really work, exactly—though it monitors them constantly, it is in a perpetual state of decay—and yes, it is a project of Finster, the all-knowing corporation where Anja works as a lab scientist. Or she did, until her division is suddenly shut down and she’s promoted to “Laboratory Knowledge Management Consultant,” where she’ll “do nothing for more money.” (“That’s how companies run,” her mentor/ex-lover advises, brightly.) But when Louis, an American “artist-consultant” with a prestigious NGO gig, where it is his job to produce exactly nothing with explicit applications—“his creativity,” Wilk explains, “was both the means and the end”—returns from his mother’s funeral, he’s changed somehow, in ways that Anja cannot pinpoint. Instead of grieving, as she imagines grief to be, he immerses himself in a new and secret creative project: a drug called Oval that gets people high on generosity. “Generosity is already in the brain, just waiting to be unlocked,” Louis tells her. “It takes the tiniest change to make giving feel better than taking.” It could be the solution to inequality. After all, he says, “Capitalism—it’s in the brain.” With Louis consumed by his project, and the eco-colony all but condemned, Anja—who has developed a mysteriously vicious rash— is left to navigate an increasingly sinister reality. If the novel sounds dangerously on-the-nose, it isn’t thanks to Wilk’s off-kilter humor. But the book’s true surprise is its startling emotional kick: If the circumstances are heightened to extremes, the relationships—with their delicate dynamics—are all too real.
Witty and alarming, a satire with (unexpected) heart.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59376-405-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
A first English translation of a 1989 Hungarian novel, in which the arrival of a traveling circus in a nondescript village arouses local curiosity, paranoia, and terror and ends in a kind of communal madness. Like the work of Austrian ur-pessimist Thomas Bernhard (which may have influenced it), Krasznahorkai’s darkly funny parable is presented in chapters of unbroken long paragraphs, and attains both a hurtling momentum and a pleasing complexity in the presentation of its passionately interconnected characters—the most memorable being the Valkyrie-like hausfrauen Mrs. Eszter and Mrs. Plauf, the former’s estranged husband (a music teacher who tries and fails to remain aloof from his neighbors’ fear of everything new and different), and the latter’s son Valuska, a young idealist whose “awakening” is gloomily foreordained. Not an easy read, but ingeniously composed and fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-7043-8009-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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