Readers well acquainted with Quixote will see some of Branston’s episodes coming a league away. Even so, he breathes new...
A picaresque first novel evokes 17th-century La Mancha and its odd inhabitants, not least of them Spain’s most famous writer.
It’s a premise to do Borges proud: “the author of Don Quixote, one Miguel Cervantes, deceased” authorizes a new author, whose mind “has never found a true purchase in a worthy ideal,” to continue the tale of the Knight of Woeful Countenance, and said heir makes good. British writer Branston does a fine job of channeling Cervantes, capturing the original’s stateliness and good-natured scenarios, and turning in a sometimes riotous, sometimes-somber story in which Quixote’s author meets his own creation. Cervantes, it develops, has a Sancho Panza–like pal named Pedro, whose ambition it was “to be the world’s finest merchant in traded goods” and who seems to know everyone worth knowing; the old knight, just released from a lunatic asylum after a 20-year hitch, is just one of his acquaintances, and in due course other characters reminiscent of those in the original Quixote fall in to take their part in the madcap adventures. This being a postmodern work, though without the reverential self-referentiality of so much of its breed, Branston makes a few digs at the business of writing and publishing. Most of his efforts, however, are directed at delivering a reasonable simulacrum of Cervantine storytelling, and in this he acquits himself nobly. Indeed, in his hands Cervantes himself becomes a fine hero, as he was in real life; readers will find it richly satisfying to see the famed author, armed with “more-than-regulation-length sword,” attending to miscreants and book pirates even as the forlorn Errant Knight bumbles and stumbles across the parched countryside, fighting for truth, justice and the chivalric way.
Readers well acquainted with Quixote will see some of Branston’s episodes coming a league away. Even so, he breathes new life into a classic but little-read tale. A pleasure through and through.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
