Hill displays an intimate, artfully nuanced knowledge of Chinese customs, bureaucracy, and character in one of those novels...
Hill, an English teacher in China (A Bend in the Yellow River, not reviewed), spins a marvelously credible and affecting tale about a colony of human barnacles shipwrecked through decades of turbulent Chinese history and determined to weather the onslaught of modern capitalist changes.
The villagers of Shaoyang, in the Hunan Province, once dreamed and fought for the socialist paradise heralded by Mao and Zhou Enlai, whose exhortation to take Communism to the moon and stars prompted the locals to rename the local factory Number Two Space Rocket in his honor. By the early ’90s, the counterrevolutionary “troubles” of Tiananmen Square have been squelched and the local factory, once the livelihood of the entire village, abruptly shuttered as an anachronism. The news provokes Party Secretary Li to drape subversive banners (“The Privileged Officials Masturbate Over Blue Movies”) from the window of his apartment house and hang himself, sending ripples of alarm and despair throughout the lives of his neighbors. Hill gradually focuses on the fierce circle of Old Zhu, once a zealous party member and “reeducator” until he was jailed himself; his ferociously hard-shelled wife; and their son, Da Shan, a former student demonstrator who, imprisoned after the June 1989 uprisings, returns to his hometown a rich man. Patiently, and with incomparable devotion to his characters, he illuminates each life, from the marital heartbreak of Madam Fan—who still practices her Beijing Opera arias on the balcony and dreams, improbably, of love and wealth for her only daughter—to Da Shan’s former lover and co-conspirator, Liu Bei, fallen into prostitution at the Drink and Dream Teahouse. Centuries of Chinese history are packed into each small, sure act of Hill’s villagers, and priceless observations floated over vociferous family meals.
Hill displays an intimate, artfully nuanced knowledge of Chinese customs, bureaucracy, and character in one of those novels that seems, like its people, to have found its own rare way.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-82400-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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