by Jérôme Ferrari ; translated by Howard Curtis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2017
An elegant, cheerless meditation on how even the brightest people can find it in themselves to accommodate evil on the way...
Prix Goncourt–winning novelist Ferrari continues his program of interrogating history to expose brittle truths about our nature.
In Where I Left My Soul (2012), not published in the U.S., Ferrari, a sometime professor of philosophy, took the occasion of the Algerian War and the collapse of the Fourth Republic to examine justifications for political violence, including torture and assassination. In this book, he travels into the heart of another evil, writing a long address to the philosopher and physicist Werner Heisenberg, who, in his explorations of the nature of the universe, “looked over God’s shoulder and saw, through the thin material surface of things, the place where their materiality dissolves.” As the protagonist, himself a young philosopher navigating a chaotic world, looks many years after the fact into Heisenberg’s life—and not for nothing, perhaps seeking to forget some of what he had seen, did Heisenberg develop his famous “uncertainty principle”—he unearths the dark forces that shattered Europe in 1914, a time when it was revealed that God, for all his games, is “also the master of horror.” The narrator watches, himself a little horrified, as Heisenberg is gradually co-opted until, finally, he is implicated in the Nazi effort to build an atomic bomb, sheltering on a remote island in the North Sea so windswept that no plants will grow. In the end, Heisenberg is reduced to justifications of the kind usually advanced by lesser, “despicable men trying to rely on their own incompetence in order to draw moral advantage from it,” though Ferrari also offers the possibility of a small moment of grace, if not moral redemption. The epistolary effect of a narrative addressed to its subject is daring and uncommon, but in this case it works, part accusation, part plea, part quest and inquest.
An elegant, cheerless meditation on how even the brightest people can find it in themselves to accommodate evil on the way to annihilation.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-352-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jérôme Ferrari
BOOK REVIEW
by Jérôme Ferrari ; translated by Alison Anderson
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
Share your opinion of this book
More by John Steinbeck
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.