by Hiromi Kawakami & translated by Michael Emmerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2010
Evocative, original exploration of grief—more of a journey than a destination, with plot almost beside the point.
In this debut novel from Japanese writer Kawakami, a Tokyo woman coping with the mysterious loss of her husband finds herself suddenly drawn to a small fishing village.
Kei, the 40-something narrator of this dreamlike novel, has made a life for herself that appears solid, even as her thoughts show it is anything but. A writer, she shares an apartment with her mother and an increasingly distant teenage daughter named Momo. She is also in a long-term relationship with a married man, Seiji, who actually seems more into Kei than she into him. That could be because 12 years earlier Rei, the man she loved, vanished, leaving her and Momo alone. What role, if any, Kei had in his disappearance remains vague, as if Kei herself is unsure of it. Was it another woman? Foul play? Either way, she has on some level shut herself off emotionally. Feeling restless one day, however, she spontaneously gets on a train and ends up in Manazuru, a sleepy seaside burg. There she feels herself “followed” by spiritlike presences and not for the first time. One of these apparitions, a chatty woman, seems especially interested in Kei. Kei in turn wonders if this spirit can help her uncover whatever happened to Rei and maybe even contact him on the other side. Whether or not the spirit woman is real, or a part of Kei’s subconscious, remains a central question. Kei keeps going back, and her buried memories of Rei blend with disturbing and beautiful visions. And it soon becomes clear, as Kei is drawn deeper and deeper into this quest for closure, that she runs the risk of losing herself—as well as the people who care most for her. Subtly compelling, Kawakami’s novel interestingly blends whodunit, travelogue and a dash of tasteful eroticism.
Evocative, original exploration of grief—more of a journey than a destination, with plot almost beside the point.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-600-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Ted Goossen
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by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Allison Markin Powell
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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