Tries too hard to do too much but is likable anyway.
A boy with a tragic past comes of age in Las Vegas.
"Asians can't figure me out, and it drives them nuts. I'm like Asian, but stretched tall. Long body, small features. Curly dark hair. Like one of those long-necked aliens with a wig." Self-esteem is not Walter Stahl's long suit, but at 17, he hasn't had much to make him feel good about himself. His mother, Emily, took off when he was 5 in the wake of a tragedy that left his father, already damaged by loss, ruined beyond repair. Imagining that Emily has fled to Las Vegas, father and son follow her there—but the years pass without any sign. These days, Walter is scanning for Vietnamese-looking women among the visitors who tour the Viva Las Vegas! museum, where he's a guide. In parallel with his tale is woven an earlier narrative, one that tracks Emily from the time she backed out of the driveway in her blue Volvo and hit the road. Parts of the story are told in graphic novel form, which works quite well, and there are also reproductions of pages from Walter's sketchbook. His favorite subjects are two human statues at the Venice Venice hotel, Apollo and Diana, who turn out to be a brother and sister from Greece. "I've spent hours studying his body....the deep cleft of his hairless chest, the line that begins at his hip and swoops down to touch upon his fig leaf and curve back up to the other hip, that shadow that runs along the side of his thigh from his knee to the perfect roundness of his ass...." Clearly, Walter's on the verge of learning something new about himself. Sie's debut novel is a bit weighed down by all the darkness he's loaded in: there are too many deaths and betrayals, too many back stories and digressions, too many Greek myths; also, it's disappointing when a major plotline turns out to be a fantasy.
Tries too hard to do too much but is likable anyway.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05566-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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