These often haunting stories of violence, faith, and disconnection make for a memorable voyage into a number of unsettled...
A host of characters grapple with the legacy of war, religious obsessions, surreal instances of violence, and an enduring guilt in this collection by a writer who was born in Yugoslavia and now lives in Canada.
Novakovich’s (Shopping for a Better Country, 2012, etc.) new collection abounds with stories of displacement. Characters leave the countries in which they were born to seek their fortunes elsewhere; religious pilgrims suffer misadventures as they grapple with their own mortality; and people find themselves taking on the personality traits of those they encounter under bizarre circumstances. The aftermath of war—whether those that took place in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s or the second world war decades earlier—leaves a heavy mark on many, which sometimes manifests as realistic depictions of trauma and grief and sometimes ventures into the surreal and mystical. In “Dutch Treat,” a former U.N. peacekeeper encounters the survivor of a massacre in Srebrenica years later in New York. The two engage in a wary back-and-forth, as the former peacekeeper is both overcome by guilt and begins to take on qualities of the other man’s paranoia. That kind of strange obsessiveness lends many of these stories a welcome unpredictability, whether Novakovich is writing about a grieving family or a soccer hooligan who seeks to make amends for his role in a horrific act of revenge. And some of the observations made throughout the book are wonderfully succinct. In one story of an interpreter caught up in war, for example, Novakovich summarizes the protagonist’s predicament neatly: “It seemed incongruous to Ana that these men would have childhood memories.” In a different story, another character offers a more humanistic take on things, saying, “All we are is soul.” The stories told here span the gulf between the two statements.
These often haunting stories of violence, faith, and disconnection make for a memorable voyage into a number of unsettled minds.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941088-66-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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