An intellectually ambitious if uneven introduction to a talent worth watching.
While running the gamut from realism to fabulism to parable, the 14 stories in Biguenet's debut collection share a profound concern: the issue of what constitutes moral behavior.
Aiming more at the mind than the heart, these high-concept exercises in fictional ethics constantly ask what if? At his best, Biguenet can be apparently straightforward about situations that are anything but. In "The Vulgar Soul," the first story here, the narrative takes on a low-key tone to tell about a man who experiences stigmata, first as a disease, then as a lucrative gift, and finally as a spiritual responsibility. In "Fatherhood," a couple's grief over the loss of their unborn child leads them toward a creepy alternative reality worthy of The Twilight Zone that may also offer genuine redemption. In these pieces and others, notably "The Open Curtain," in which a salesman enjoys a few charmed days of clarity as his life slides into failure, and "Lunch With My Daughter," in which a father chooses to keep his parenthood a secret for his daughter's sake, Biguenet weaves a fabric so delicate that it is almost transparent, his message elusive yet haunting. Unfortunately, the author often turns preacher, condemning slavery in "My Slave" and racism in "I Am Not a Jew" in terms most of his readers will find redundant. His weakest stories can be lifeless: "Rose," another narrative of parental grief, is as unpleasantly contrived as "A Battlefield in Moonlight." But Biguenet is a brave writer, forcing the reader to consider uncomfortable realities. "Do Me" is a particularly disturbing exploration of the boundaries of contemporary love within the context of sadomasochism. The title piece, which follows "Do Me," explores the same subject but as a fable, its more formal tone belying its basic brutality.
An intellectually ambitious if uneven introduction to a talent worth watching.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019835-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling collection of five dreamlike, mysterious long stories all published in the years 1987—90, by a highly praised Japanese writer whose Kafkaesque fictions have won his country’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Ikezawa’s baffled, questing characters—a factory worker whose collusion with a criminal associate makes him a psychic “fugitive” (“Still Life”); a weather observer who infers from nature’s unpredictability that “the whole human race is powerless”; and a survivor of an ill-fated expedition unhinged by the changes survival has wrought in him (“Revenant”), among others, share a stunned awareness of the paradox silently mocking those who would transcend: that “there’s a way of life in which all existence becomes one. . . But the only way we can live is by being enclosed within ourselves.” Haunting fiction, not nearly as abstract as summary makes it sound, from a major new talent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 4-7700-2185-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
As unsettling as they are beautiful, these quietly wise stories wedge themselves into your mind—and stay there.
Wonderfully weird and profoundly witty, Australian writer Dovey (Blood Kin, 2008) recounts a history of 20th-century human catastrophe in 10 short stories, each told by an animal who was there.
In “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat, and I,” a house cat—inadvertently separated from her beloved bohemian owner—prowls the trenches of the western front, giving comfort to the soldiers and recounting adventures from better days. “Hundstage,” one of the eerier tales in the bunch, follows Himmler’s dog, exiled in the Polish forest. In war-ravaged Mozambique, twin elephants come of age listening to tales of their ancestors. Not every story is so grim, however, and while all of them are dark, some are tragically hilarious, brilliant in their absurdity. In one, a Kerouac-ian mussel seeks adventure and meaning on the hull of a ship. In another, a Russian tortoise escapes from its hermit owner, is adopted by Leo Tolstoy’s daughter, becomes the pet of Virginia Woolf in London (in a section called “A Terrarium of One’s Own”), and ultimately returns to the motherland, where she's launched into orbit as part of the Soviet Space Program. A military dolphin, sent by the U.S. Navy to fight enemy divers in Iraq, writes posthumous letters to Sylvia Plath. In the hands of another writer, this would all be hopelessly twee. The inner monologues of animals, all of them doomed by human tragedy, is high-risk terrain: too earnest and it’s sentimental, too moralistic and it’s preachy, too clownish and it’s a cartoon. But Dovey’s stories, at once charming and haunting, are something else altogether. “Absorbing” is not quite the right word for them—their poetic oddness keeps them at arm’s length—but they are intoxicating nonetheless.
As unsettling as they are beautiful, these quietly wise stories wedge themselves into your mind—and stay there.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22663-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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