Tightly plotted, this fierce literary thriller packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential...
A colonel fleeing the repressive Theological Republic confronts a former prisoner in an unnamed northern European nation.
French-Iranian author Hachtroudi’s English-language debut, told mainly through intense first-person narration, follows the colonel’s final attempts at gaining asylum. A confidant of the Supreme Commander in his home country, he has been questioned repeatedly for five years, denying his participation in the regime’s program of kidnapping and torture. His translator at this last interrogation at the Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons turns out to be “455,” a prisoner famous for her staunch resistance to naming names. Their alternating voices are intimate and well-etched. The colonel reveals the shaky status of his quest through short, choppy sentences: “They never get tired. There is always some point that needs clarifying. Some missing element. They have nothing better to do.” The translator’s voice is more fluid: “Does language, any language, flow more easily when the subject is love?” That question becomes the crux of the story. In a frightening turn, the colonel stalks the translator, but they soon form an uneasy connection over relationships rent apart by the violence of the totalitarian regime. Because of the narration’s deeply internal monologue, events unfold nonlinearly, and it is not always clear when an event has actually occurred. Nor is it always clear when characters are actually speaking to one another or imagining conversations they would like to have with people far out of reach. This murkiness feels appropriate to the territory of traumatic memories, self-delusion, double-dealings, and half-truths.
Tightly plotted, this fierce literary thriller packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential questions about power and our responsibilities to one another.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-306-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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