There’s a lot of verbal and postmodern high jinks in these 700-plus pages, and they will likely strain anyone’s patience and...
A man with amnesia and $20 million, a well-read venture capitalist adrift after a hot deal, and two drug lord gunmen combine to perform a time-twisting minuet in this big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir of a debut.
Take Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace at their densest, some Malcolm Lowry–esque south-of-the-border malevolence and lots of technobabble, financial arcana, and myriad ad hoc drivel sessions—that may start to suggest what Gauer is up to here. The core story is simple, but he breaks it up and reassembles it with two narrative voices, assorted time jumps, a cool shift in point of view, and a compulsion to spin out every basic element across dozens of pages while exploring the outré entries of the English lexicon. It begins with a man waking up in a Guanajuato, Mexico, hotel. He has a bump on his head and no memory of his identity. His wallet tells him he bears the same name as a pseudonym of the early-20th-century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (Gauer is a poet and, not incidentally, a venture capitalist). A local banker tells him he has almost $20 million in his account. When the narrative—covering the week of April 13 to 20 in 2009—shifts to the gunmen, they are assigned by their Shakespeare-quoting boss (“Guy’s like two-thirds Money, one-third Thesaurus”) to comb through El Paso and Juarez for a guy who has a lot of the boss’s money, part of a laundering operation that also somehow entails the VC’s latest hot and dubious deal. It’s only when the VC flies to El Paso and embarks on a phantasmagoric road trip south that key players and plot points begin to coalesce. The closing pages include one horrific scene that unfortunately is later replayed and an epic Mexican standoff that more or less starts with a man citing Ovid, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger within six lines.
There’s a lot of verbal and postmodern high jinks in these 700-plus pages, and they will likely strain anyone’s patience and commitment, but for readers who enjoy this kind of thing, it will be worth the effort.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55713-433-2
Page Count: 722
Publisher: Zerogram Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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