This immersive novel creates a memorably delirious sense of mystery, obsession, and altered perceptions.
Giono’s novel tells a harrowing story of isolation and taut social interaction cloaked with ambiguous psychology and a growing sense of menace.
Murder, obsession, and fraught interpersonal relationships abound in this novel, but it’s telling that the book opens with a pair of paragraphs discussing the histories of the families and the landscape around the village where it's set. This is a novel in which terrible things happen to numerous people, and Giono doesn’t take long to introduce the first of many sinister events: the disappearance of a woman named Marie Chazottes. It’s the middle of the winter of 1843, and Marie’s disappearance and the claustrophobia brought on by the snowfall ratchets up tensions among the villagers. The disappearances continue, and the townspeople take further precautions: “New, very precise passwords were given to everyone. The school was closed. People were advised not to leave the village for any reason, even in broad daylight,” Giono writes. Attempting to solve this mystery is a gendarme named Langlois, described by the narrator as “a right rascal.” Langlois eventually brings the case to a resolution, and by the time he returns to the village, he seems somehow altered. Gradually, Langlois emerges as a contradictory figure: one part haunted investigator, one part figure of quiet menace. The means by which Giono tells this story creates a fantastic sense of the community surrounding Langlois: The novel’s narrator frequently interpolates the narratives of others into the larger story, and the result is a kind of compound, collagelike tale, one that has elements of detective fiction but which abounds with ambiguity. Susan Stewart’s introduction impressively places this work within Giono’s own biography and 20th-century French history.
This immersive novel creates a memorably delirious sense of mystery, obsession, and altered perceptions.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-309-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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