LALA

Name: LALA
Author: Jacek Dehnel
ISBN: 978-1-78607-357-0

by Jacek Dehnel ; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2018

Best for extremely patient readers, who will be rewarded with some exceptionally beautiful passages in the final 100 pages,...

bookshelf

First-time novelist Dehnel uses his grandmother’s life and reminiscences as a springboard for a sweep through Poland’s turbulent 20th century, mingled with musings on the nature of storytelling.

Though she was born in 1919, Lala’s stories begin with the childhoods of her grandparents, Polish aristocrats who inhabited a “mythical land…beyond an impenetrable wall, in the bizarre world that we agree to call the past.” The author himself is a character here, appearing first as a 14-year-old who, toward the end of the 20th century, delights in writing down and relating to friends his Granny’s tales of the way of life ended by World War I. Both Lala and her mother have complicated love lives involving multiple marriages and children not necessarily the offspring of their husbands at the time, but Granny also branches off into chronicles of the peasant brigands and thieving servants who made the family’s home turf in Lisów “the greatest bandit village on earth.” Jacek is fascinated by it all, but readers may be more restless. It’s difficult to keep track of everyone wandering in and out of Granny’s fragmented recollections, particularly during the grim World War II years, when surprisingly decent Germans, roving partisans, and then triumphant Soviets come and go in droves. What gives the novel gathering force, as Granny’s memory fails and her body deteriorates, is Jacek’s keening meditation on the transience of earthly things. Observing the garden of his family home, so lush in his childhood, he grieves: “Because I knew that with…the hacking down of every tree, with the inevitable death of each peony or rosebush that the rampant weeds had choked, came the irrevocable erasure of a primeval codex, the obliteration of ancient formulae and epic poems.” His book—this book—is his tribute to that vanished world and the grandmother who brought it to life for him.

Best for extremely patient readers, who will be rewarded with some exceptionally beautiful passages in the final 100 pages, poignantly alive with loss and love.

Pub Date: July 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78607-357-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

bookshelf

Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘East of Eden’ Series in the Works at Netflix

- BOOK TO SCREEN
4 New Adaptations To Watch in October

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

bookshelf

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.