Two narratives of frustrated possibility, offering an awareness of the brutal indifference of modern life.
Amdahl (stories: Visigoth, 2006) examines darkly ludicrous aspects of modern American culture in two novellas.
The first novella, “I Am Death, or, Bartleby the Mobster,” introduces us to a journalist named Jack, author of a monthly column called The Meaning of Life. Jack is contacted by George Swanson, a lawyer for brutal mobster Frank Fini. It seems that Fini, in a spasm of consciousness about his own dwindling mortality, wants Jack to ghostwrite Fini’s memoirs, to be called A Boy’s First Book of Mobsters. Jack is convinced he can write “not…some mock-sophisticated infotainment for a global media empire, but rather a very great and timeless book.” Meanwhile, Swanson speaks as though he’s ingested Sam Fuller movies (“Look, do us a favor and yourself one in the process and don’t get wise, all right?”), and, except for chain-smoking, Fini remains in a state of almost perpetual catatonia. “Peasants,” the second and longer novella, introduces us to the hapless Walter Rasmussen, currently in a state of ill health because of various petty betrayals and office politics involving a project he’s trying to run for the World Summit for Sustainable Development. Amdahl is not so much interested in the project itself as in how it brings out conflict in the strange and non-adaptive personalities involved with it. These include Cage (named after the avant-garde composer), who “wore his hair long and his beard full because, he said, that was what men looked like in nature,” and Jessica, to whom Rasmussen feels attracted but who’s turned off by her “shriek[ing] and wail[ing]” at a Jimmy Buffett concert “like men who have won ATVs on game shows.”
Two narratives of frustrated possibility, offering an awareness of the brutal indifference of modern life.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57131-071-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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