WELCOME TO PARADISE

Name: WELCOME TO PARADISE
Author: Mahi Binebine
ISBN: 1-86207-647-2

by Mahi Binebine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2004

A fine debut: richly atmospheric and evocative, at once a sharply narrated tale of suspense and a carefully constructed...

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Moroccan painter-novelist Binebine offers a glimpse into the Third World through a masterful account of North Africans trying to sneak across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain.

There’s a touch of Casablanca about the tale, except that the refugees here aren’t Europeans and the café they hang out in is a good deal less glamorous than Rick’s. Narrator Aziz is biding his time with everyone else at the Café France, a little place on the beach near Tangier, waiting for the arrival of the boat that will smuggle the group into Spain. Most emigrants from North Africa are poor and fairly desperate, but beyond that this is a pretty diverse group, each person bearing (or concealing) some profound grief that drives him or her to flee home under the worst circumstances imaginable. Nuara’s case is fairly straightforward: Her husband, Suleiman, has worked in France for years but only recently has stopped sending money home, leading Nuara to fear that he has died or—worse—found another woman. Aziz’s cousin Reda still labors under the shame of his mother’s suicide, just as Yussef is haunted by the tragic misunderstanding that led his father accidentally to poison most of his large family. The masseur Yarcé is at loose ends, having been dismissed by his rich English employer, who had promised to take him home to England with him. As they wait in the little café run by Momo, the thrice-deported Francophile who is the go-between for the smugglers, each of the little group eventually tells his story—all save Aziz, that is, whose own history is murkier and in some ways more troubled than any of the others. When they finally see the light from the ship, all are more than ready to leave. The only remaining question is whether they will arrive.

A fine debut: richly atmospheric and evocative, at once a sharply narrated tale of suspense and a carefully constructed memoir of inner grief.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004

ISBN: 1-86207-647-2

Page Count: 182

Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: June 24, 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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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.