by Louise Doughty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2004
Doughty is a competent narrator, but her characters are dwarfed by the terrible times through which they move.
A Holocaust novel featuring the Gypsies of Central Europe.
Gypsies are dirty parasites. That stereotype is swiftly demolished by British author Doughty (An English Murder, 2000, etc.) as she introduces us to a small group of Kalderash Roma in Czechoslovakia. These nomadic Gypsies, who live in their wagons, are industrious, self-supporting, and squeaky clean (they even have domestic purity laws). Formerly coppersmiths, they pick fruit in summer and make barrel hoops in winter. Their Big Man is the tenderhearted Josef, whose beautiful wife Anna has just given birth to a boy (Emil). It’s 1927; only the hated gadje (white non-Roma) stain their idyllic existence; whether they are Czech or German makes no difference. Their rules and regulations culminate in 1942 with Registration Day, a ruse to round up all Gypsies and intern them. The heart of the novel is their experience in the Czech camp. As they drop like flies, what is initially harrowing quickly becomes numbing. Josef sickens and enters the no-exit infirmary. Emil’s life is made hell by a sadistic Czech guard. The iron-willed Anna is the natural protagonist, but her gender bars her from center stage, so the 15-year-old Emil becomes the designated survivor, a heavy burden for young shoulders. Anna commands him to escape. Free of the camp, he kills an old peasant for his clothes and travels to Prague, where he’s sheltered by Ctibor, his father’s old friend and (surprise) a decent gadjo. When he returns to rescue the rest of his family, he finds the camp deserted: they have all been shipped to Auschwitz. Emil’s primal howl of grief would have provided an appropriately bleak ending, but Doughty sends Emil back to Prague so he can reunite with Marie, another young Gypsy survivor of the camp. Their contrived reunion is just one element of a chaotic scene, as the German occupiers flee and the partisans hound them through the streets.
Doughty is a competent narrator, but her characters are dwarfed by the terrible times through which they move.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-057122-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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