Slight in girth but not in depth.
In Vapnyar’s (Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, 2008, etc.) latest novel, a simplicity of narrative—two strangers share their lives over a weekend together—belies the complexity of interwoven themes and ideas.
As the book begins, Lena is a self-conscious, self-criticizing woman traveling to an academic conference she does not feel prepared for, being only a professor at a community college. The trip, though, is also a temporary escape from her miserable marriage and, thus, welcome. En route, she fixates on the summer she spent, many years ago, as a counselor for 8- to 10-year-olds at a summer camp in her native Soviet Russia. There, though an outsider by nature, Lena had a friend in her co-counselor, Inka. At camp, there was the prospect of romance, and sex, with the male soldiers who worked there. There was gossip and fantastic stories told not only by Lena and Inka, but by the children they tended. And there were mysteries, too. Small things that touched Lena personally, but didn’t add up and never resolved. It’s clear that, in some space of Lena’s head, she has never left. At the conference, she meets Ben, a university professor who teaches courses on graphic novels. Because he is interested, and asks her directly, Lena begins to tell Ben stories from camp, stories she’s never told before—walking through woods, corralling children, the heat wave and the mysteries that persist. Ben has his own strangely intense childhood stories and is equally unhappy in his relationship. Impulsively, they embark on a road trip together, sharing chapters of their lives along the way; both characters grow more vivid in the process, as if dusting each other off for new use. Vapnyar’s writing style feels like Lena’s camp—everything seems to be in plain sight, but one can sense deeper truths hiding below the surface. As Ben and Lena get close to uncovering some of these truths, their time together inevitably dwindles. Purely silly moments, the headiness of strangers connecting and the universal nature of summer camp lighten the mood.
Slight in girth but not in depth.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1262-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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