CABO DE GATA

Name: CABO DE GATA
Author: Eugen Ruge
ISBN: 9781555977573

by Eugen Ruge ; translated by Anthea Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2016

At times ruefully hilarious and absurd, this slight, philosophical book will humor anyone who’s ever questioned his or her...

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In German Book Prize winner Ruge’s (In Times of Fading Light, 2013) new novel, a writer abandons his life in Berlin and embarks on a journey toward self-realization.

In the wake of his mother’s death and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ruge’s unnamed narrator finds himself deeply discontent with the mind-numbing monotony of his life. He’s 40, exists generally in solitude, and can’t seem to cut ties with his ex-girlfriend Karolin, whom he dated for 10 years. After being cajoled into watching Karolin’s daughter (whose father, ostensibly, is not him) on New Year’s Eve, our narrator decides it’s time to leave Berlin and finally start that novel he’s been meaning to write. The next morning, “like a man venturing into the street for the first time after a long sickness,” he departs to Barcelona and, from there, takes an overnight bus to the titular Cabo de Gata, a village on the southeast coast of Andalusia (a word which he, heretofore, always thought fondly of as “A kind of fantastic adjective meaning wonderful or enchanting”). Suffice it to say, it’s no paradise. To his dismay, he’s dropped off in a ghost town complete with shoddy architecture, a few vacant bars, and a promenade overrun by gangs of cats and dogs. But after a few peculiar encounters on the beach—involving a deceased hermit crab and a flock of synchronized birds hunting for food—he decides to stay for more than just one night and eventually acquiesces to the simpler lifestyle of Cabo de Gata. And the fact that he’s largely ignored by the locals only makes him more emboldened by his anonymity. The tone of the novel shifts and gradually becomes darker when our narrator meets an elusive ginger tabby cat that takes to him and also eerily reminds him of his mother. With colloquial prose and sardonic wit, Ruge eruditely captures his narrator’s precarious reality and creates a world that’s a pleasure to observe and meander through.

At times ruefully hilarious and absurd, this slight, philosophical book will humor anyone who’s ever questioned his or her place in this unforgiving universe.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016

ISBN: 9781555977573

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN TIMES OF FADING LIGHT
by Eugen Ruge ; translated by Anthea Bell

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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.