by Lars Saabye Christensen & translated by Kenneth Steven ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2004
Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming...
Deracinated, incomplete people undertake interlocking quests for human connection and self-realization.
This epic Norwegian novel, a major European bestseller and prizewinner, is a complex mosaic tracing the lives of several generations of the Nilsens, a fragmented Oslo family, throughout the WWII years and afterward. Christensen’s narrator is Barnum Nilsen, a physically stunted, alcoholic, melancholic scriptwriter who attempts to make sense of his hollow life by assembling a context for it from stories half-told and imperfectly remembered by his distracted forebears and single estranged sibling. The latter is his older half-brother Fred: the product of their mother Vera’s rape by a German soldier, who grew up an angry malcontent (and, incidentally, accomplished boxer), a willfully mute vagabond bent on understanding himself by researching the misadventures of his great-grandfather Willem, vanished during a voyage to Greenland. The former are the unstable Vera herself, her alcoholic mother Boletta, and her maternal grandmother (“the Old One”), a former silent-film star lost in memories of her bygone youth, beauty, and fame. Another narrative and thematic strand explores the past of Barnum’s father Arnold, an itinerant con man who charmed the ingenuous Vera with tales of his youthful adventures, climaxed by joining a circus. It is in fact the lesson Arnold learned under the Big Top (“Imagination is the greatest thing there is!”) that fuels Barnum’s passion to examine every facet of his own past and heritage, in effect curing his own depression and despair by freeing and exercising his imagination. Christensen’s intense saga (with intermittent echoes of such ambitious predecessors as Grass’s The Tin Drum and Michel Tournier’s The Ogre) is both an arduous read (owing to numerous long run-on sentences) and a thrilling and stimulating black comedy that shows, unforgettably, how art—and understanding—are shaped out of pain and suffering.
Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming masterpiece.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-715-1
Page Count: 696
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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