A clever, affectionate poke in the ribs: just sentimental enough to be nostalgic, just sharp enough to avoid sentimentality.
Critic and first-novelist Sansom (The Truth About Babies, not reviewed) takes a wry look at an Irish village and discovers an exceptionally lively world.
Despite all the articles about the hip new Dublin scene, the Irish are still a fundamentally rustic people, more at home in the villages and crossroads they’ve come from for centuries than in the cities and suburbs that they’ve gravitated toward of late. Ask Davey Quinn. After years of making it big and living the high life in London, Davey has come home to the little Irish town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. There have been some changes—the big old hotel in the center of town is now an abandoned ruin, and the American-style shopping mall has drained much of the business from the High Street stores—but Davey can still recognize most of the people. There’s the upstart millionaire Bob Savory, whose chain of sandwich shops (“Quality Food for the Discerning Palate”) have pushed him into the upper reaches of local society (alongside the likes of aristocratic Sir George Sanderson, publisher of the local paper, or realtor Frank Gilbey, who developed the mall). Billy Nibbs is a self-published poet who works as an investigative reporter at Sir George’s paper (The Impartial Recorder), under the serotonin-deprived guidance of editor Colin Rimmer. And Francie McGinn is the strangely charismatic pastor of the People’s Fellowship church, famous throughout this Catholic region for his quasi-pornographic wedding sermons and his Good Friday barbecues. It’s all very cozy and familiar, but the question still arises: Why did Davey turn his back on success in the big city and come home to this small pond? Maybe he wasn’t as successful as he lets on—or maybe he’s about to find something here that he overlooked the first time around.
A clever, affectionate poke in the ribs: just sentimental enough to be nostalgic, just sharp enough to avoid sentimentality.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-715739-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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