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MONSIEUR

Name: MONSIEUR
Author: Emma Becker
ISBN: 978-1-61145-761-2

by Emma Becker translated by Maxim Jakubowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2012

Ultimately, Ellie’s novel is erotic, prurient and kind of boring.

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The subtitle “An Erotic Novel,” makes it clear what to expect from Becker’s first novel, translated from its original French: Fifty Shades of Grey sex weighted (or balanced depending on one’s taste) with literary pretentions.

In this metafiction, Ellie, who shares the author’s last name, writes a novel about her 10-month affair with the married Parisian surgeon she refers to as Monsieur. Ellie took her first lover, a 30-year-old, when she was 15. Now 20, a literature student living at home, Ellie pursues 46-year-old Monsieur before actually meeting him because her uncle has mentioned in passing his medical colleague’s interest in erotic literature. After Monsieur responds to her email sharing her similar interest, they carry on a sexually explicit if highly intellectual conversation through emails, texts and phone calls. Ellie is soon meeting him for Tuesday morning trysts in a hotel room. As a sign of trust, they do not use protection against STDs, despite their lack of exclusivity, or hygiene. Few will be surprised to learn that he dominates her in various ways, and she enjoys the submission, at least at first. He lets her visit him at the hospital, where their desire must be contained, barely, in front of others. Initially, she is not crazy about the anal sex—and there is a lot of anal sex—but she grows to love it. The descriptions of what goes where, particularly his hands and her “arse,” the ecstatic nature of pain and desire, domination and submission, are evocative but get repetitive after awhile. Soon, his limited time to spare becomes a problem as her physical obsession grows. Her purely sexual interest becomes more emotional than she wants to admit. Refusing to break off completely, he seems to play with her dependence, but perhaps he is as secretly obsessed as Ellie. It is hard to say because Ellie admits she learns almost nothing about him. Neither does the reader, who will find Ellie herself increasingly sad.

Ultimately, Ellie’s novel is erotic, prurient and kind of boring.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-61145-761-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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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.