by Jesse Ball ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2009
Although not for readers without patience for experimental fiction, this Jungian house of mirrors offers riches, including...
Surreal tale from Ball (Samedi the Deafness, 2007, etc.), an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, of a young pamphleteer, a Coney Island guess artist and their joint effort to search for and save an amnesiac woman.
Selah Morse, who has just self-published his master-pamphlet, “Worlds Fair 7 June 1978” has, literally through nepotism, been appointed “municipal inspector” with the Seventh Ministry, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy whimsically plunked down in modern Manhattan. His colleagues, boss Levkin and message-girl Rita, toss assignments, wisecracks and enigmas at him with abandon. One day, Selah accompanies a mysterious young woman to the hospital after she’s been hit by a taxi. Naming her Mora Klein, he poses as her boyfriend and promises to keep her awake for 18 hours to prevent brain damage and restore her memory. During their vigil at his apartment, Selah recounts stories that double back upon each other and nest like Russian dolls. First, Darius, a lucky gambler, marries beautiful Ilsa but accidentally barters her to a diabolical merchant. At a country Inn, Ilsa encounters Selah and his fellow traveler in the quest for Mora, a guess artist, skilled at divining thoughts. At a Victorian house whose inhabitants can never leave, Selah and sidekick learn about Count M., unfaithful beloved of a Russian empress who punished him by forcing him to marry Kolya, the ugliest of women. Sif, possibly Mora’s alter ego, meets Morris, a boy who is a tree climber and far walker. Morris guides Selah down a twisting burrow to a meadow inhabited by a kind couple who are really foxes. Mora won’t see Selah until he has come to the Inn “thrice, and by three different paths.” The third path returns Selah to his apartment, and he and Mora, having survived the night, head to Coney Island to consult a certain guess artist.
Although not for readers without patience for experimental fiction, this Jungian house of mirrors offers riches, including fractured fables whose characters occasionally threaten to burst their archetypal bonds.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-38746-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...
When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.
Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14861-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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
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