A creatively constructed narrative that doesn’t come together in a fully satisfying way.
Siwicki’s follow-up to his 2009 novel Expression explores themes of time, memory, perception, and consciousness through a story of an ordinary man’s brush with death.
Sam Young leads a simple, straightforward life in his small hometown. After he graduates, he opens a photography studio, and earns an honest living as a community photographer. Even his love life follows a narrow path, as he lives with his first love, Esther, a pretty nurse at the local hospital. Although the couple sometimes dream of moving to a city to further Sam’s photography career or Esther’s modeling aspirations, they’re relatively complacent in their provincial life. Siwicki’s introductory prose is clear and descriptive. However, the main characters lack dimension, and readers may find it a challenge to become invested in their story. Sam’s ordinary life is shaken up, though, when a mysterious man from a prestigious magazine commissions him to photograph the estate of a famed, missing architect. Sam embarks on a long, overnight drive to the site. Alone in the car, he muses about the transitory nature of memories and life. These interludes read like a surrealist film monologue: “Is everything just a solitary moment? Is time eventually used up, then gone forever? Where does time come from, and where does it go?” As Sam drives along the highway, Siwicki explores the four possible states of consciousness that give the novel its title, and the consequences of each. The premise is intriguing, and it would probably translate well as a film. However, its execution here is confusing. During the driving segments, for example, Siwicki refers to Sam simply as “the driver,” and readers may initially think that he’s a different character. It’s also difficult to decipher which events transpire in reality and which don’t; however, that may be the author’s point. Sam’s camera also seems to play a sort of magical role, but this idea isn’t fully realized.
A creatively constructed narrative that doesn’t come together in a fully satisfying way.Pub Date: June 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480288355
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
With only a sliver less suspense, Koontz follows up 1996's Intensity with an afterlife novel about a plane crash. Los Angeles crime reporter Joe Carpenter (ah, those initials) needs resurrecting. One year ago his wife, Michelle, and two daughters, Chrissie and little Nina, actually did die in a devastating plane crash over Colorado: no survivors. In a dive, the plane had rocketed straight into millennial rock, leaving only two pieces larger than a car door. Joe, locked in unbearable grief, has quit work, sold his house, moved to a studio apartment over a garage, and is gnawing himself to death with weight loss. Meetings with a compassionate survivor group haven't helped. Rage and anger with an unjust God in whom Joe doesn't believe takes up all his energy. Then visiting his wife and children's graves, Joe finds Dr. Rose Tucker, a black Asian woman with great presence who's taking Polaroids of his family's burial sites. She tells him she survived the crash! But suddenly two men appear and start shooting at her as she races off. Joe soon finds himself involved in unraveling a suicide plague that has struck relatives of the plane's dead. Rose has taken Polaroids of the graves of other relatives as well—but whoever gets one of her pictures first sees a blissful image of the afterlife, then commits suicide, often horribly. As Joe tracks Rose down, he hears that a little girl survived with her, a girl named Nina. Has mankind reached a turning point, as Dr. Tucker avers, at which science has now proven the existence of the afterlife? Funded by a multibillionaire, a secret but massive scientific effort larger than the Manhattan Project has made fantastic strides in the paranormal and revealed a breakthrough into . . . but some baddies want to use this discovery for their own ends, and thus Joe and Rose—and Nina!—must be killed. Masterfully styled, serious entertainment. These are Koontz's great years. (First printing 600,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42526-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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