A story of quiet beauty that doesn’t require the contrived insertion of fairy tales to enchant. (Later this year...
Canadian den Hartog follows a twin back to her ruptured childhood in 1980s Ontario, where she suffered the tragic loss of her sister.
Eugenie and Jane, who grow up with their frustrated artist-mother Lucy and their angry father in Ontario, are perfect complements of each other: one daring and always laughing, the other cautious and circumspect. Yet by the time the twins are ten, carefree Eugenie has vanished from serious Jane’s life and Jane chaffs to distance herself from the unsettling dynamics of her parents’ rocky marriage. Years later, when Jane is living with her boyfriend, Simon, and writing illustrated fables, she receives a call that Lucy is dying. A poignant, dreamlike account (addressed in the second-person to Eugenia) chronicles her journey back home to make peace with her early years. Interspersed with magical memories of dressing up as Siamese twins for Halloween and visiting their mother in Toronto, where she moved out temporarily to seek a life as an artist, the author offers oddly intrusive fairy tales in discrete chapters, titled after the names of fictional children like “Ildikoh” or “Pirouette,” which become allegories inspired by tales the twins’ mother told them as children. Lucy and her husband are locked in a passion that excludes the young girls, provoking the terrible accident that takes Eugenie’s life. Den Hartog spins her tale with a deft hand, coyly dropping foreshadowings of Eugenie’s death and hints of a lethal darkness lying within their father. Jane’s own extreme circumspection has kept her from telling the truth about her past to her lover, who in turn claims to be her Platonic other half. The tale does gain strength through affecting details, though the parents’ blithe resolution (especially when coming after the senseless death of their daughter) feels abrupt and unconvincing, and the reader is never treated to the family reunion on Lucy’s deathbed.
A story of quiet beauty that doesn’t require the contrived insertion of fairy tales to enchant. (Later this year MacAdam/Cage will publish den Hartog’s debut novel, Water Wings, which has already appeared in Canada.)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-25-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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