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DEER TABLE LEGS

Name: DEER TABLE LEGS
Author: Katayoon Zandvakili
ISBN: 0-8203-2072-2

by Katayoon Zandvakili ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 1999

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An Iranian-born Californian who writes for Publishers Weekly, Zandvakili debuts with a volume that stands out for its singular style: a hodgepodge of broken English phrases, child rhymes, and dizzying punctuation. Zandvakili’s truncated diction and cryptic asides disguise her brightly colored, girlish musings on romance. The rough and disorienting larger narrative mostly charts the bumps and bliss of modern love: “The Lying Mango,” beginning with its virginal lover, records her dreamy walks on the beach, complete with a household pet, and hopes for a marriage proposal. Similarly, “Body Light Houses,” despite its difficulties, is mainly about the pangs of young relations: she longs for a ring in a window; she waits for his call after a date; she implores herself to forget her troubles with poetry. With its unclear arc, the oddly shaped verse and the dense bits of prose, this disjointed volume captures the mystery of “teenagerhood” for one with a “foreignness of tongue.” The textures become so tangled in “Ponce de Leon” that the poet begins in media res, and that hardly matters—dream sequences further confuse the “he’s and ’she’s. Zandvakili’s odd juxtapositions lead to a series of poems on “These Fish Beauties,” which include evocative images from her childhood but end with silly talk of “paring down” lovers” lives “to a walk on the beach,” and speak of a boy and girl “tired of playing/games.” The jarring surfaces here yield no greater depth of thought or emotion.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1999

ISBN: 0-8203-2072-2

Page Count: 82

Publisher: Univ. of Georgia

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.