As broad as its themes are—touching on political, philosophical and historical divisions—Weil’s first novel is rooted in...
In a Russian city of the near future, twin brothers struggle with tradition, technology and the growing distance between them in this impressive debut novel.
As boys, Yarik and Dima learn fishing from their father. After he drowns and their mother has a breakdown, they spend time on their uncle’s farm. Shared pain and rustic pleasures remain with the twins as the story jumps about 20 years and they work on building a huge greenhouse that girds their once-depressed industrial city of Petroplavilsk. It’s a project of a consortium in the new capitalist Russia that has also filled the sky with space mirrors to reflect the sun when it sets and provide perpetual daylight for crops grown under the “mammoth solarium.” Weil (The New Valley, 2009) has fairy-tale elements and a Pushkin romance weaving through a moderately futuristic setting. The different narrative types suit a conflict that pits high-pressure urban toil and avid consumerism against a “Past Life” of agrarian labor, customs and leisure. The prose also shifts markedly from harshly realistic to lyrical and sometimes poetic, as in this description of a winter’s fishing hole: “[a] lapping blackness in the lamplit ice.” The brothers’ gradual estrangement embodies the larger conflicts. Dima the dreamer, “listening to a woods whispering at the edge of a hayfield,” retreats from work, hoping to recover the uncle’s lost farm and becoming briefly a folk hero as he recites publicly from the Pushkin epic and appears in a video made by a group of anarchists who harvest psilocybin mushrooms. Yarik, with a family and ambition, gains promotions as he’s favored by the billionaire leading the consortium, eventually turning into an icon himself of the good life. The ending errs wisely on the side of realism, addressing the key conflicts without closing all the gaps or healing all the wounds.
As broad as its themes are—touching on political, philosophical and historical divisions—Weil’s first novel is rooted in family and fine storytelling; it's an engaging, highly satisfying tale blessed by sensitivity and a gifted imagination.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2215-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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