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OLDER BROTHER

Name: OLDER BROTHER
Author: Mahir Guven
ISBN: 978-1-60945-549-1

by Mahir Guven ; translated by Tina Kover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2019

A striking debut that reveals the breadth of emotional disconnection that prejudice can stoke within a family.

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A tale of two French brothers of Syrian descent, one struggling as a rideshare driver, the other back in the Middle East on a (maybe) humanitarian mission.

Guven’s first book, winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt for a debut novel, is a sharp prodigal-son tale about life on the margins outside of Paris. The “older brother” of the title has grown wise to the ways Muslims like himself are treated in a suburb he calls “the dump of France,” scraping out a living as an Uber driver and occasional police informant, roles that leave him feeling exploited; but his father, a widower and old-line taxi driver, feels that anything is better than his native Syria, which tends to stoke rants about civil war and religion. The “younger brother,” a hospital nurse, has disappeared to the Middle East, "likely right there with the lunatics, at war, on his way to death.” The younger brother weighs in on his fate in alternating chapters, explaining how his urge to make use of his medical skills brought him into, yes, Syria, where he works as a field medic supporting rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The younger brother is also disillusioned with France, where, despite the inclusive rhetoric after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Muslims are “less-than-zeros in a society that teaches about equality and tolerance and respect,” and Guven’s novel is largely an exploration of how a shared fury at marginalization can play out in a variety of ways. Kover’s translation highlights the brothers’ differing temperaments: The older one’s street-wise, sarcastic, and jaded, the younger’s more naïve but spiritually righteous. The older brother suspects the younger has returned, prompting his concern that he’s been radicalized. Guven withholds whether that surmise is correct, giving the novel a thriller-ish vibe in its closing pages, but at heart it’s a contemplative story about what siblings owe each other.

A striking debut that reveals the breadth of emotional disconnection that prejudice can stoke within a family.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-60945-549-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019

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 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.