Not quite the equal of The Good Soldier Schweick but still a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its...
A lost classic of anti-war literature is revived in a fresh, vigorous translation.
His name may sound, to the ears of English speakers, like some kin of schlemiel or even schmuck, but Emil Schulz’s nickname, given to him by a cop, means something along the lines of “shrimp, scamp, scallywag and lump—a muddled concoction of all of these.” He is all those things, and, conscripted into the WWI–era German army, he is now, at the age of 17, the administrator in charge of three occupied French villages. There, writes Grimm, Schlump dreams, daydreams, chases women, and generally tries to avoid anything involving work; he’s a sympathetic fellow but essentially lonely, “a solitary figure as he wandered through the snowy fields of France.” Things take a turn for the worse when the Americans join the war, and then Schlump is packed off to a diabolical front line, where he tastes war for real: in one nighttime scouting foray to capture some unsuspecting British soldier for information, a comrade of his fires a flare gun into a Tommy’s stomach, and all hell breaks loose: “The Tommy was yelling, the machine guns firing at full tilt, and Schlump gave a shrill, noisy laugh.” Sent behind the lines for convalescence, Schlump dreams and schemes his way into peacetime. Both comical and arch, the novel, writes German journalist Volker Weidermann in an afterword, might have made a dent, but Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front appeared at about the same time and was heralded as “the German anti-war novel par excellence,” pushing Grimm’s tale off the charts and into obscurity. The sad ending to Grimm’s own life marks a dark conclusion to his tale, which celebrates the resilience born of bucking the system, whether the military on one side or the griftier aspects of capitalism on the other.
Not quite the equal of The Good Soldier Schweick but still a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its discontents.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-026-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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