Delightful nonsense that will lift a lot of spirits.
The hero (of sorts) has aged a year in this wildly implausible sequel to The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared (2012).
Reaching age 101 hasn’t slowed Allan Karlsson, who travels from continent to continent with his thieving friend, Julius Jonsson. A hot air balloon becomes untethered in Indonesia, and the gentlemen are soon afloat in the Indian Ocean. A North Korean bulk carrier rescues them on its way to pick up four illicit kilos of enriched uranium in Madagascar. The ship’s captain takes them back to North Korea, where they meet Kim Jong-un and convince him that Allan is a nuclear weapons expert who invented “hetisostat pressure” and that Julius is an asparagus expert. Allan gives a North Korean engineer a formula for vitamin C and smelling salts, or possibly toothpaste and bleach. When Kim kicks the Swedes out of the country, Allan picks up a briefcase with the uranium in it—easy to do, since all North Korean briefcases look alike. Allan considers giving the uranium to Donald Trump until they meet and Allan decides that the U.S. president is “awfully close to exploding all on his own” and “should be diagnosed with something.” Then he writes a letter on three napkins to Angela Merkel, who comes across as the sanest person in the book. Early on, Allan obtains a “black tablet” that shows news, music, and naked ladies. Thus he learns more than Trump, who learns all that’s worth knowing from Fox. Allan and Julius meet a grocer/coffin-maker and help her sell designer coffins at a travel and tourism trade fair. Allan discovers Twitter and Facebook, Julius plants asparagus with an assist from Merkel, and a bad guy in Africa learns the hard way what lions like to eat.
Delightful nonsense that will lift a lot of spirits.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283855-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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