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THE BOX

Name: THE BOX
Author: Günter Grass
ISBN: 978-0-547-24503-4

TALES FROM THE DARKROOM

by Günter Grass ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2010

A short, engaging and puzzling novel: “He simply dreams us up!” says a daughter, as the reader wonders what to make of these...

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A family documentary in the form of a novel, leaving the reader to decide where the line blurs between fact and fiction.

This book by the Nobel Prize–winning German author (Peeling the Onion, 2007, etc.) ostensibly allows his eight offspring to come to terms with their father, their different mothers (four in all) and their divergent memories. Yet the novelist reinforces the spirit of fiction, if not fairy tale, from the opening “Once upon a time…” He explains that not only do all the characters in this fictional memoir have pseudonyms, but that they are “all products of their father’s whimsy, using words he has put in their mouths.” Different groupings gather in different places at different times, with the novelist functioning as director, recording the proceedings. Monologue and dialogue dominate, though there are no quotation marks or any attribution to specific speakers. The results are more like a collective memoir, though memories diverge, as “the brothers and sister wend their way into the confused tangle of their childhood.” Further complicating both narrative and memory are images they conjure from the camera of their father’s late assistant, a widow named Marie, ten years his senior, perhaps his lover, whose photography allowed him to conjure the past in precise detail. Yet her photography had a magical quality, for “with her box Mariechen could not only look into the past but also see the future.” And it could divine the wishes of all whose pictures she took and make those wishes come true, at least in photographs. For Marie, the box of the title is “sacred…like the good Lord: it sees all that was, that is, and that will be.” As the reader wonders whether the author has recast memoir as fiction, the story of Marie and her camera suggests fantasy rendered as truth.

A short, engaging and puzzling novel: “He simply dreams us up!” says a daughter, as the reader wonders what to make of these dreams.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-547-24503-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OF ALL THAT ENDS
by Günter Grass ; translated by Breon Mitchell ; illustrated by the author

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM GERMANY TO GERMANY
translated by Günter Grass ; by Krishna Winston

- BOOK REVIEW
PEELING THE ONION
by Günter Grass & translated by Michael Henry Heim

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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.