What Haskell is describing is conditionality, which is a thrilling notion, but this only makes it more disappointing when...
Haskell’s latest book blurs the line between fact and fiction, action and meditation, telling a story or a series of stories while at the same time reflecting on what they mean.
The subject is ballet, about which Haskell is knowledgeable and astute. He builds the book around five classics—La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadère, Swan Lake, and Petrushka—using them to frame a broader narrative that takes place in contemporary Los Angeles. For Haskell, identity is a key issue (his 2009 novel, Out of My Skin, revolved around a Steve Martin impersonator who feels himself become indistinct through his imitation), and he writes deftly, meaningfully, about the fluidity of experience and the self. “You make adjustments to where you thought you were going, and who you thought you were,” his narrator, who has suffered a grievous personal loss, tells us, “and this is my direction, I thought, the direction I find myself going, and what I have to do, or what I have to be, or somehow what I am, is ahead of me.” The same, of course, is true for all of us, which is what gives his novel its urgency. And yet, as the book develops, it shifts direction, coalescing around a loosely formed plot involving gangsters and a gambling debt. It’s not hard to see what Haskell’s up to; the ballets he describes, and integrates into his text, involve betrayals, false or lost loves, the irrevocability of circumstance. Still, if melodrama is central to these dances, it is less effective on the page. The more the story turns toward the narrator’s entanglement, the more we lose sight of the larger, even existential, questions with which Haskell intends to engage. “When I said before,” he writes, “that I wanted my life to be like a dance I meant it, of course, metaphorically. You can dance sitting down. Or weaving between pedestrians on the street. Sometimes I like to get in my car and just drive, more or less mindlessly, without destination, going straight if the light is green, turning if the light is red, following the dictates of the world as manifested by the signals of the world.”
What Haskell is describing is conditionality, which is a thrilling notion, but this only makes it more disappointing when the book becomes, more or less, a conventional crime story in the end.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-787-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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