THE WORD OF THE SPEECHLESS

Name: THE WORD OF THE SPEECHLESS
Author: Julio Ramón Ribeyro
ISBN: 978-1-68137-323-2

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro ; translated by Katherine Silver with introduction by Alejandro Zambra ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019

A welcome selection of prose that introduces a Latin American master to English-language audiences.

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Sometimes bleak, sometimes warily humorous stories by Peruvian writer Ribeyro.

Ribeyro (1929-1994) is in the second tier of the Latin American Boom, much less well known than his compatriot Mario Vargas Llosa, to say nothing of Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Jorge Luis Borges. The latter’s influence can be sensed in some of the stories gathered here, especially the ones in which Ribeyro’s protagonists turn out to be ghosts, as the closing of the first story, “Tracks,” reveals: “He remembered that the monogram on the handkerchief were his initials, and he no longer had any doubt that inside his room the spectacle of his own death had just taken place.” In another story, a fisherman similarly awaits his own murder; in still another, a bankrupt man considers the relief that a plunge down a seaside cliff, “that precise border between the earth and the sea,” might bring. Some of Ribeyro’s stories, especially the earlier and the shorter ones, are imbued with death, sometimes revealed, sometimes acknowledged at the very beginning of a story (“But he…found little interest in all of these subjects, as he had been dead for three days”). Almost all have a kind of knowing cynicism to them, with ironic distance but not without humor, as with the long story that gave its title to a late collection, “For Smokers Only”; there, the protagonist, a chain smoker like the author himself, admits to a host of health problems—“indigestion, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, dizzy spells, and a stomach ulcer”—that have beset him while concluding that, well, since Flaubert smoked so much that his mustache was yellow and Gorky and Hemingway were also addicted to tobacco, there may just be good literary reason to keep puffing away. Albeit happy endings are few, Ribeyro’s stories often offer unexpected twists, their characters mysteriously disappearing in a flurry of snow or puffs of smoke from cigarettes here and guns there.

A welcome selection of prose that introduces a Latin American master to English-language audiences.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-68137-323-2

Page Count: 264

Publisher: New York Review Books

Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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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...

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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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.