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THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS

Name: THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS
Author: Gayle Brandeis
ISBN: 0-06-052803-6

by Gayle Brandeis ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2003

In all, a wrenching tale exploring similar Korean-American identity as Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2001).

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Korean folklore and ornithology figure in the lives of a former GI prostitute and her black fatherless daughter in an earnest, sad-funny debut, winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize.

At 25, Ava Sing Lo lives with her mother, Omma, in San Diego, has a music degree, and feels crushing guilt about her ancestry. She also has an unfortunate history of accidentally killing her mother’s beloved birds. Wanting to surprise her mother by having the carpet cleaned, she destroys the parrot by chemical fumes; or, after refrigerating the robin eggs she finds in the kitchen, she learns that Omma was hoping to hatch them. In penitence, Ava enlists as a volunteer on Salton Sea to help the California brown pelicans that have been poisoned by pesticides. Meanwhile, Omma keeps a journal chronicling the long history of her daughter’s bird slaughter—it also functions as a metaphorical history of Omma’s inability to fly free of the curse of her past as a prostitute. In alternating chapters, while Ava adjusts to the stinking daily death of pelicans, the reader learns of Omma’s early attempt to escape her adolescence as a sea urchin diver on Cheju-Do Island: she runs away to her friend Sun, sings at a folk village, then at a striptease joint for black GIs. Known as Helen, and pregnant, she manages to get to San Diego as the fiancée of a white soldier, who then abandons her when the black baby is born. Brandeis gives enormously sympathetic qualities to both Ava and her strangely impassive and emotionally scarred mother. Too many elements, however, fight for ascendancy and resolution: murdered prostitutes washed up on the shores of Salton Sea; the sorrowful, desperate history of Helen’s and Sun’s lives as GI prostitutes; and the early massacre at Cheju-do in 1948. While the writing can be breezy and lightweight for such gravitas, the plight of the mother and daughter is still heartbreaking.

In all, a wrenching tale exploring similar Korean-American identity as Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2001).

Pub Date: May 2, 2003

ISBN: 0-06-052803-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ART OF MISDIAGNOSIS
by Gayle Brandeis

- BOOK REVIEW
SELF STORAGE
by Gayle Brandeis

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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.