An uneven novel that depends on its intriguing heroine.
In a slim novel divided into four parts, Blauner (It Looks Worse Than I Am, 2014, etc.) explores the themes of Frankenstein in the context of a bizarre father-daughter relationship and a quest for self-understanding.
Mara lives a lonely and confusing life with her father, a disgraced scientist who lost a wife and daughter in a car accident. Driven by grief, he creates Mara out of parts collected from corpses, assembling them with endless operations and experiments in an obsessive attempt to re-create the loved ones who haunt his laboratory in photographs. Mara is not yet an accurate facsimile. Parts of her body wear out and need to be replaced. She struggles to control her unusual physical strength and is terrified of hurting other creatures by accident. After a disturbing visit from an outsider, Mara runs away and sets out on a journey that has the feel of a fairy tale, despite its more contemporary setting. She encounters a series of unusual characters, and each interaction serves as a lesson about self. The story lacks subtlety and harps on themes of self-discovery, but Mara’s dogged curiosity and integrity give the novel an appealing energy. She's an engaging heroine, and the fact that the story is told in her voice helps smooth over odd lapses in logic and strangely awkward turns of phrase. Blauner often reaches for a quirky expression of detail that sometimes creates a charming image (“His usual frown ruffled his forehead like a hat”) and sometimes verges on silly (“Greg’s corneas screamed with my awkward reflection”), but when her writing is at its clearest and simplest, Mara’s wonder at her journey and the people she meets springs off the page and welcomes the reader into her world.
An uneven novel that depends on its intriguing heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935248-88-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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