WHEN SHE SLEEPS

Name: WHEN SHE SLEEPS
Author: Leora Krygier
ISBN: 1-59264-086-9

by Leora Krygier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2004

Very flat, though: The author concentrates so thoroughly on the interior world of her two protagonists that it’s difficult...

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Elegant if a bit lugubrious story of the odd reunion of a Vietnam vet with his Amerasian daughter.

One of the more enduring legacies of the war in Vietnam are the con lai—half-breed children of American GIs and Vietnamese women. Fifteen-year-old Mai is one of these. Her father, Aaron, was a US Army surgeon who did several tours of duty in Southeast Asia in the early ’60s, while her mother, Linh, was the daughter of a rich and prominent Vietnamese family. Life for the con lai was difficult in the best of times, but it becomes especially hard with the fall of Saigon and the advent of a communist regime that is both anti-bourgeois and anti-American. After enduring a succession of refugee camps and “reeducation” centers, Linh and Mai emigrate to Paris, where they are taken in by relatives. Mai adjusts well to Paris at first, but after Linh sinks into depression and eventually disappears, Mai becomes an insomniac. Meanwhile, Aaron, who’s been living unhappily in Los Angeles with Evelyn and their daughter Lucy, begins searching for Linh and Mai and locates them in Paris. Now a distinguished specialist in sleep disorders, Aaron brings Mai to LA for treatment and introduces her to his family. Evelyn is understandably upset and wants nothing to do with Mai, and Lucy finds the situation difficult to acknowledge as well. Told alternately from the perspectives of Lucy and Mai, Second-novelist Krygier (First the Raven, not reviewed) portrays the tentative steps by which two young women discover and come to terms with their identities and adjust their perceptions of the world and themselves.

Very flat, though: The author concentrates so thoroughly on the interior world of her two protagonists that it’s difficult to see them as real characters moving through real situations.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004

ISBN: 1-59264-086-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Toby Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.