A pleasurable novel, with turns of plot and phrase both startling and elegant.
An enrapturing debut novel that toys with magical realism while delivering a fresh fable.
One night, Ruth hears a tiger in her home. This reminds her of her childhood in Fiji, where her parents were missionaries, though there were no tigers in Fiji. Nor are there tigers where Ruth abides, alone in a seaside home on the southern coast of Australia, her children grown and living in other countries. The morning after Ruth hears the tiger, Frida appears as if from the sea. She explains that she is a government “carer.” A spot opened up, she says, and Ruth was on their waiting list. Ruth is not sure she needs a carer—she’s only 75—but Frida looks like she’s from Fiji, and a few hours a day couldn’t hurt. Initially, it seems that Frida is exactly what Ruth needs: a no-nonsense, larger-than-life presence who keeps Ruth company and her floors shining and sand-free. Ruth doesn’t hear the tiger again for some time. But other strange things begin to happen, things that test Ruth’s sense of reality with increasing frequency and, eventually, give rise to an unshakable foreboding. Ruth has reasons not to trust Frida. We have reasons not to trust her either, some that will be explained and some that will remain a mystery. McFarlane’s rendering of Ruth’s interior is quiet and exacting, and she builds suspense so gently that the danger is, at first, hardly noticeable. Frida, seen through Ruth’s eyes, is as compelling as she is enigmatic. By the time Ruth hears the tiger again, she and Frida are allied in a spiral of love and dependency that will dictate both their futures.
A pleasurable novel, with turns of plot and phrase both startling and elegant.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-86547-773-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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