by Ma Jian ; translated by Flora Drew ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019
A masterwork of political satire, meaningful without heavy-handedness.
How do you make sure everyone’s on board with the program in a totalitarian state? In Ma’s (The Dark Road, 2013, etc.) imaginative telling, you make sure they share the same dream.
Ma Daode has it easy: Director of the China Dream Bureau, he has a bathroom off his office, gets suggestive texts from multiple women, makes good money, and sports a “pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat.” He’s got big plans to insinuate the “China Dream” into the minds of everyone in a provincial city and then into the nation at large, replacing private dreams with a shared Party-approved vision. Yet, as the author lets us know from the start, Ma Daode is subject to memories that trouble his sleep and come faster as his plans for dream domination take shape. Ma Daode, it develops, was a young conscript in the Cultural Revolution, a teenager who got caught up in violence and trouble that soon settled on his own family. As the China Dream project takes its twists and turns, melding Chinese traditional thought with Marxism, it seems increasingly absurd. Yet, swamped by memories from the past, Ma Daode urges himself to “hurry up and make the China Dream Device so that all these bloody nightmares can be erased,” though a wise interlocutor warns of one particular turning point in the struggle, “Well, if you want to forget that night, you’ll have to wipe out the entire Cultural Revolution, I’m afraid.” That seems just fine to Ma Daode, and though his colleagues think it a pipe dream, he presses on with his dream device while remembering the sight of long-ago corpses that “lay there for days, growing purple and swollen like rotten aubergines." As Ma, a dissident writer living in exile in London, makes plain, there’s no escape from the past, and trying to do so guarantees a messy future: “utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship.”
A masterwork of political satire, meaningful without heavy-handedness.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-240-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Ma Jian & translated by Flora Drew
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by Ma Jian & translated by Flora Drew
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by Ma Jian & translated by Flora Drew
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...
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.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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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