A constricted tale of unresolved mourning only partly redeemed by the clever twist Raphael (Burning Down the House, 2001,...
A fictional take on Raphael’s chronicles of the lives of Holocaust survivors’ children.
It seems almost as if Paul Menzus was born on the occasion of his mother’s death. Returning to New York a few days after her funeral to meet with his siblings—beautiful, bitchy Dina, whose wealthy Quebecois husband got her to leave her job as a book editor, and screwed-up, bisexual Simon, who drives a cab in Queens—he says nothing of anyone or anything not intimately connected to his mother's demise, except to sing the praises of rural Michigan and to regret the loss of Valerie Hoffman, the girlfriend he abandoned to move there. His narrative, as airless as his parents’ closed-up apartment on West End Avenue, focuses so exclusively on his memories of his mother, a bleak, carping Holocaust survivor, that it seems a miracle when Valerie appears, still unmarried, and accepts his dinner invitation. Even at dinner, Paul obsesses: Why wouldn’t his mother speak of her experiences during the war? Why did a healthy woman die suddenly of a heart attack? And why did she leave him her reparations—the tainted “German money” Dina wants him to share, money that threatens to rip apart his remaining family?
A constricted tale of unresolved mourning only partly redeemed by the clever twist Raphael (Burning Down the House, 2001, etc.) saves for the end.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9679520-0-X
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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 The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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