Not all of this collection matches that high level, but there's more than enough here to enhance Tanizaki's...
Six previously untranslated, wickedly warped stories, all but one originally published before 1927, from the acclaimed Japanese master of bizarre and erotic fiction (Quicksand, 1994, etc.).
Tanizaki, who died in 1965, gives the phrase “child's play” a new twist in “The Children” (1911), which shows a young schoolboy becoming a willing participant in the sadomasochistic sport of his wealthy, spoiled classmate. After school they concoct new torments for each other on the grounds of the rich kid’s estate, drawing his older sister and the son of the family groom into the fun. But the forbidden pleasure of the piano studio, which only the sister may enter, proves an irresistible lure, ultimately giving her the upper hand to devise her own forms of depredation. In a somewhat later story, “Mr. Bluemound,” a beautiful movie actress whose young husband and director has succumbed to a mysterious illness makes a startling discovery while reading his will. There she finds the story of her husband's life-altering encounter with a middle-aged man so obsessed with her that he's purchased pieces of her films so as to exactly reproduce her body parts, which then become part of a collection of life-sized rubber dolls he uses around his house. Perhaps the most memorable erotic innovation here, however, involves something done with food. The title story describes the search of an aristocratic gourmand throughout Tokyo for yet-unimagined delectables, a search that brings him by chance to a private Chinese club where he is permitted to observe (through a hole in the wall) but not to taste; from there he brings back to his own gourmet group, among other things, an experience with bok choi and a woman's hand that is truly a classic moment in world literature.
Not all of this collection matches that high level, but there's more than enough here to enhance Tanizaki's still-substantial reputation.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 4-7700-2690-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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