Wildly uneven, awesomely ambitious: a mess, in fact, but you can’t help but be impressed by the author’s commitment and...
Hill (Dixie Church Interstate Blues, stories, not reviewed) lards 2,500 years of history and misery onto the 17-hours-and-27-minutes-long drama of a little girl's rescue from a mineshaft.
“It is Monday, June 9, 2003,” the omniscient narrator informs us. “Our story begins long before, if we believe that all back story is also story, that the underside of the iceberg explains what we see above.” You have been warned: connections will be made, moral lessons will be underscored, the small niceties of the well-made novel will be disdained. The author introduces us to an appealing young family—Annie Maki, Justin Wong, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Ursula—and sets up a strongly emotional premise as Ursula vanishes down a hole in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Hill then sends us back to China in the 3rd century b.c., beginning a saga that will unfold in 8th-century Finland, 17th-century Canada and Sweden, and 19th-century California, delving into the experiences of the Finnish and Chinese immigrants to America whose blood flows in Ursula’s veins, with a few chapters interpolated to remind us she’s still underground. Reminiscent of Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes in its relentless catalogue of disasters and willingness to yank readers away from characters just as they're beginning to engage our interest, the narrative aims to make a political point as women are abused, workers die due to companies’ negligence, and rich brat Jinx Muehlenberg hits ten-year-old Annie with her car and speeds away, crippling the girl for life. The fact that Jinx later makes a pass at Justin while he’s working on her house is practically the least outlandish coincidence in a story crammed with unlikely conjunctions. Why does all this madness sometimes work? Because Hill’s prose is vivid, if undisciplined, and her passion is ultimately contagious. The cumulative impact of all those ancestors’ stories adds an epic grandeur and surprising emotional punch to the finale, when Hill finally deigns to allow us to follow step by step the painstaking effort to bring Ursula out of the shaft.
Wildly uneven, awesomely ambitious: a mess, in fact, but you can’t help but be impressed by the author’s commitment and boldness.Pub Date: June 11, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-388-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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