Not quite the comedy of errors it aspires to be but an intriguing portrait of Lebanese culture nonetheless.
An aspiring writer becomes embroiled in an international crime ring tucked inside Beirut’s publishing industry.
This seriocomic tale by veteran Lebanese novelist Douaihy (The American Quarter, 2017, etc.) centers on Farid, a young writer whose efforts to sell his work are rebuffed by a series of publishers. (“No one reads,” one tells him.) However, he gets his foot in the door at Karam Brothers Press, a century-old firm that offers him a job as a copy editor. Hoping for a break, he dutifully brings his notebook to the office every day—and the one night he leaves it there, the offices are visited by law enforcement and the notebook vanishes. Misunderstandings proceed to pile upon each other: The book is not in the hands of the police but the publisher’s flirtatious wife, Persephone, who’s so enchanted with the prose she has a single copy of the book printed on paper that Karam Brothers had been using to produce counterfeit Euros. Douaihy plainly enjoys tinkering with the themes of art vs. commerce that the plot sets up: Does writing have actual value in the world, he means to ask, and if so, how does it acquire it? There are dark-comedy, Kafkaesque scenes throughout—Farid’s opus perpetually slips from his possession, and he insists his work is poetry to the authorities “to diminish the value of his book.” But there’s a sense that the novel’s humor is underplayed by the author and perhaps weakened by the translation, which tends toward flat descriptions. Douaihy overstuffs the narrative with baroque details about the publisher’s history to suggest a century of criminality and duplicity. But in the book's finer moments, Farid’s anxiety shines through, and Douaihy writes beautifully about the particulars of Arabic grammar and calligraphy.
Not quite the comedy of errors it aspires to be but an intriguing portrait of Lebanese culture nonetheless.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62371-990-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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