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SEVEN SAMURAI SWEPT AWAY IN A RIVER

Name: SEVEN SAMURAI SWEPT AWAY IN A RIVER
Author: Jung Young Moon
ISBN: 978-1-941920-85-5

by Jung Young Moon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2019

An oddly entertaining stream of consciousness that flows out over the thirsty Lone Star State.

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Curious roman à clef about an eccentric South Korean author’s sojourn in Texas.

This slender tale, Moon writes, is “a story about Texas, something that I’m writing in the name of a novel but something that is perhaps unnamable.” It’s a novel, yes, but one that builds on word association: A shower of acorns on a November day reminds the narrator of a sculptor who’s working on a statue of a wolf, which turns into a brief history of Wolf brand chili, which touches off a reminiscence of eating chili: “I hoped that the controversy over whether or not to acknowledge chili with beans as chili…would go on being the greatest controversy surrounding chili." Armed with a bucket of stereotypes about Texas, from ten-gallon hats to “many trivial things among which were things that were good to know, although it wouldn’t have mattered if you didn’t know them regardless of whether you weren’t a Texan or you were,” Moon conjures the seven samurai of Akira Kurosawa film fame, who morph into the seven rōnin from Texas who come to the aid of a bandit-besieged village south of the border. The samurai aren’t especially good at swimming, a fact that figures in Moon’s ponderings on Bonnie and Clyde sipping hot chocolate alongside the flood-prone Trinity River, “which perhaps had the most grandiose name of all rivers.” It’s a jumble of legends, travel notes, and odd disquisitions—one in which Moon explains, after a fashion, how he’d previously placed the samurai in a story about a cat that, on its face, had nothing whatever to do with medieval Japan but everything to do with the talismans of the imagination that Moon holds dear. The mysterious exercise indeed touches on the unnamable to the extent that it’s hard to classify—but suffice it to say that it has little to do with the likes of Max Brand and Larry McMurtry.

An oddly entertaining stream of consciousness that flows out over the thirsty Lone Star State.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-941920-85-5

Page Count: 164

Publisher: Deep Vellum

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A CONTRIVED WORLD
by Jung Young Moon ; translated by Jeffrey Karvonen & Mah Eunji

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.