Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.
Set during the bloody height of the Colombian conflict and spanning more than two decades, Pachico’s unforgettable whirlwind of a debut centers around the intersecting lives of a group of wealthy schoolgirls as well as the parents, teachers, and housekeepers who move in their orbit.
It’s 2003, and Stephanie Lansky’s parents have taken off for the holiday weekend to attend a lavish party in the mountains of Cali, leaving 17-year-old Stephanie—she herself has declined the invitation—under the care of their beloved housekeeper. But one day in, and Stephanie finds the housekeeper gone, the phone lines dead, and a man with a thickly scarred face buzzing ceaselessly at the door. Now it’s 2008, and Stephanie’s former eighth-grade teacher, held captive in the Colombian jungle, spends his days teaching the finer points of Hamlet to a class of leaves and sticks, parasites burrowing into his arms. In Cali, a class of third graders dutifully writes condolence cards to the parents of a classmate, blown up over the mountains. In New York City, a Colombian expat has reinvented herself as an American fashion student, dealing drugs to Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side college boys, each tiny bag of powder carrying a remnant of the past she can’t seem to escape. A little girl grows up with a pet lion in a house so opulent there’s an indoor fishpond; a young man writes articles about the links between the government and the death squadrons and has his fingers axed off by masked men with machetes. Taken alone—and some have been published as such—the chapters work as complete short stories, full worlds as vibrant and jarring as fever dreams. But together, they form something much larger, revealing a complicated and morally ambiguous web of interconnecting lives.
Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58865-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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