A thoroughly bizarre, frequently compelling literary thriller.
A translator finds herself enmeshed in a bizarre plot in this highly referential novel.
Many novels begin with a professional taking on an assignment they probably shouldn’t. That’s what happens to Vanessa Salomon, the narrator of Greer’s novel, who begins work on a new project from a French novelist known initially as Not Michel Houellebecq. Soon enough, she learns that there are actually two authors using that name: H1, “a serial harasser,” and H2, who tells Vanessa he’s hired H1 to be his public face while he works as a corporate CEO. Things get more complicated from there, with the plot eventually encompassing Vanessa’s actress sister as well. As Vanessa continues working with H2, she finds traces of her late ex-lover in a hotel room and comes to believe that H2 may have sinister designs on her. If this all seems ornately complex, you’re not wrong, but Vanessa’s caustic voice goes a long way toward supplying a memorable comic edge. “I was born in a trilingual household, you see—French, English and money,” she says early in the book. Later, she notes that “in France diminutives are regularly employed to address children and strippers.” As befits a book about a translator, Greer’s novel abounds with literary references, with a passage at the end indicating that “raw material” for aspects of the plot comes from Recollections of the Golden Triangle by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Readers familiar with Greer’s work as a screenwriter (including Unsane, 2018) will find a few easter eggs here as well. The ending feels a bit unwieldy, but a charismatic narrator can work wonders, and that’s the case here.
A thoroughly bizarre, frequently compelling literary thriller.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-91350-534-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.
A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel.
Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus—accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this—embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws—big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities—don't mar the experience in any significant way.
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537619
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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