THE YELLOW RAIN

Name: THE YELLOW RAIN
Author: Julio Llamazares
ISBN: 0-15-100598-2

by Julio Llamazares & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2004

Little plot, and somewhat static, but suffused with a poetic intensity that rivets the reader’s attention to the page: a...

bookshelf

An old man awaits his solitary death in an abandoned village in Spain’s Pyrenees Mountains: a limpid 1998 novel, its Spanish author’s first to appear in English translation.

Andrés, who narrates (and whose name we don’t learn until the closing pages), lives alone with memories of the decay of his village (Ainielle), whose inhabitants were forced to seek work and live elsewhere when a local mill closed down. We gradually learn of other losses Ainielle and Andrés have suffered: his four-year-old daughter Sara died of respiratory failure; one son, Camilo, never returned from fighting in his country’s civil war; another, the old man’s namesake, had left home a dozen years earlier, over his father’s objections. And Andrés’s wife Sabina, stunned by loneliness and depression, has recently hanged herself. The old man “haunts” his ruined house, accompanied only by a devoted dog, observing the “yellow rain” of falling autumn leaves, surrounded by empty domiciles as moribund as he, where he watches mold and rot advance and frequently hears “the monstrous thud of a wall collapsing.” A fascinating ambiguity develops, as Llamazares deftly suggests contrasting possibilities: that the old man is believed dangerously “mad” by former neighbors reluctant to return to Ainielle to reclaim possessions left behind; or that he actually is a ghost speaking to us from beyond the grave. Things clarify as Andrés’s dead begin “visiting” him, seemingly waiting for him to join them—and in a virtuoso climactic sequence in which previous hauntingly lyrical descriptions of natural change (e.g., the aforementioned “rain”) and of the sensations of aging and decaying culminate in a gorgeous, despairing threnody.

Little plot, and somewhat static, but suffused with a poetic intensity that rivets the reader’s attention to the page: a fine introduction to the work of a very accomplished novelist.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-15-100598-2

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.