Definitely not a book for sourpusses. The rest of the world will chuckle all the way through it.
A funny and completely implausible farce about a woman, a bomb and a man’s frustrated ambition to overthrow the king of Sweden.
Nombeko Mayeki is a 14-year-old latrine cleaner in apartheid-era Soweto who is exceptionally good at her job. Because of her race, she is incorrectly presumed to be illiterate. She gets another job as the housemaid of the nuclear engineer in charge of South Africa’s secret program to build six atomic bombs, and in her spare time, she masters Wu Chinese at the library in Pretoria. The engineer is an incompetent fool who accidentally builds a seventh bomb that remains a secret even to his bosses. Soon, Nombeko ships two crates: dried antelope meat to feed herself as she escapes to Sweden and the 1,700-pound atomic bomb the engineer wants sent to the Mossad in Israel. But the packages get switched, and for years Nombeko carts a 3-megaton bomb around Sweden while the Mossad doesn’t know what to do with the antelope meat. Meanwhile, Ingmar Qvist’s lifelong dream is to abolish the Swedish monarchy. He indoctrinates his identical-twin sons, both named Holger, to carry on after his death. But Holger One is an idiot, and Holger Two, whose birth was not registered and who thus technically doesn’t exist, is intelligent. Because Nombeko is an illegal immigrant, she doesn’t exist either. And of course the bomb doesn’t exist. Can Nombeko and Holger Two prevent the idiot anarchist Holger One and his idiot girlfriend, Celestine, from blowing up the king, themselves and a sizable chunk of Sweden? Author Jonasson is wickedly inventive with a constant flow of absurdities, for which his narrator blames the Almighty: “If God does exist, He must have a good sense of humor.” This book follows Jonasson’s equally crazy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2012).
Definitely not a book for sourpusses. The rest of the world will chuckle all the way through it.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232912-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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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