A postmodern Twilight Zone: dark, bizarre, and a bit pretentious.
The first of Toptas’ novels to be translated into English introduces American readers to the noted Turkish writer’s version of postmodern surrealism as it follows the dreamlike, dream-filled journeys of a Turkish soldier.
Moving out of his apartment, long-retired soldier Ziya escapes a protracted farewell from his landlady only to fall down an elevator shaft. Or to dream he does. When he wakes, possibly into another dream or into memory, he's a child in his hometown, where he kills a bird. He wakes again, this time in the village of his old army buddy Kenan, who has renovated a cottage for Ziya to inhabit in his retirement. It's been 30 years since the two men served together, and when Kenan’s mother expresses gratitude to Ziya for having saved Kenan’s life, Ziya has no memory of what he did. What he remembers is the bird he killed because “its soul has followed me forever after” in various forms. Kenan draws Ziya into the routine of village life, until one day Ziya takes a walk through the forest away from the village. He finds himself gone back 30 years to the moment he was inducted into military service. The line between dream and memory has again blurred. The long section that follows, however, a picture of military life as Ziya experienced it on the Turkey-Syria border, is less surreal than bureaucratically Kafkaesque. Ziya encounters sadistic officers, ridiculous regimentation, pointless deaths, and shadows of that dead bird as he and Kenan are shipped from one outpost to another, usually but not always together. When Ziya is finally discharged, the train he boards stops in a forest. He disembarks and ends up back in Kenan’s village as the older man he was when he left. Now he recognizes the names on the cemetery headstones as his dead comrades’, and his life in the village becomes endangered by rumor and innuendo.
A postmodern Twilight Zone: dark, bizarre, and a bit pretentious.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-061-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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