Unfinished indeed, and uncharacteristically unshaped; these little chapters of memory—some of them just first drafts, most of them dictated in old age—offer several vivid, spare Rhys paragraphs and more than a few arresting moments, but with virtually no cumulative effect. First, bits on growing up in a quasi-colonial world on the West Indian isle of Dominica: superstitious, teasing black nurse Meta ("the terror of my life"), who showed "me a world of fear and distrust, and I am still in that world"; convent school, feeling the hate of black classmates; melancholy mother, distantly doodling father; and, above all, words and books ("Before I could read. . . I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book"). Then. . . off with an aunt to England, where Rhys went to drama school, became a touring chorus girl, had her first love affair-cumabortion-and-breakdown (Poem: "I didn't know/ I didn't know/ I didn't know"), and learned to loathe landladies everywhere. And finally (with Rhys' notes becoming ever more perfunctory)—marriage, Paris, motherhood (one infant died), divorce, remarriage. Plus: free-associative inner dialogues from a 1947 diary (which would take well to a dramatic reading); a reprinted musing on "My Day" from Vogue; and an intriguing foreword by Rhys' longtime editor Diana Athill. True, Rhys put most of her life into her novels and stories', nonetheless one feels acute disappointment here that a full autobiography was never written. In any case, Rhys' readers will want to dip into these thin, suggestive sketches—for the clues and parallels to the fiction, for the moment when the depressed chorine first started writing (filling three exercise books at 20, then not looking at them for seven years).
Pub Date: May 28, 1980
ISBN: 0140184058
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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