MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON

Name: MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON
Author: Jan Blensdorf
ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

by Jan Blensdorf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2003

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing...

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Australian journalist Blensdorf, now England-based, debuts with an overwrought melodrama about the beleaguered life and long identity crisis of a woman half-Japanese and half-American.

So much could have been so wonderful if our narrator’s imaginative and likable American father hadn’t died in New York “one evening as a stolen car shot out of the darkness.” His death leaves the little girl and her modest Japanese mother at the mercy of his parents: the grandfather is nice enough, but the grandmother is a crushing snob who scorns the mother and wants only to Americanize the girl a.s.a.p. Result: the two flee back to Tokyo to live with “my mother’s elder brother.” So much could have been so wonderful if only the unmarried uncle weren’t an intolerable, cruel, perverted male-supremacist brute (he’s obsessed by samurai swords) who drives his sister to suicide, whereafter he does something equally unspeakable to our poor girl narrator. And so much could have been so wonderful if only the narrator’s new husband hadn’t turned out to be—well, a brute and slug. Her shameful divorce alienates her enraged uncle forever—but our narrator inherits a little incense shop and, in its quiet upstairs room, sits behind a screen and listens to the sad stories of her male “clients,” then gives such spoken comfort and advice as she can. (The real Sei Shonagon was a courtier in the Heian period who, when she was given paper as a gift, used it to write The Pillow Book, circa a.d.1000). What at last seems true happiness—with the love of French photographer Alain—ends up, thanks again to brute villainy, to be something worse than any of the deaths, suicides, rapes, or divorces so far.

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing much ethnic and historic and cultural information. But, as fiction, Voices is slow going, the melodrama unrelieved (and unbelievable), the message a toss-up between the heavy-handed and the saccharine.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

Page Count: 158

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

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LITERARY FICTION

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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.

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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

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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...

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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.