A picaresque tale of personal conviction and compassion.
A disaffected German comes of age and sets out on a lifelong journey to discover himself through sex, drugs and, ultimately, spirituality in Mitze’s novel.
Walter Herzog was born in a small town outside of Frankfurt to an emotionally detached mother and a Nazi-sympathizing stepfather at the tail end of World War II. Teenage Walter and his pals come to school drunk and oversexed; eventually, they skip classes altogether to make out with girls and earn drinking money. Over the years, restless Walter finds himself loving numerous women. He gets drafted into the German military and relinquishes his service by claiming pacifism. Later, he discovers marijuana and finally settles with a beautiful girl, Hilde. But a stable relationship isn’t enough to stave off Walter’s mounting depression and intense desire to find meaning. When he and a friend visit the United States in the late 1960s, he falls in love with an unlikely place—Oklahoma City—where he encounters psychedelic drugs. He moves there with Hilde to open a restaurant, before returning to Frankfurt, addicted to psychedelics. One summer, while living with Hilde at his parents’ home in Germany, Walter has an epiphany: “People he knew or heard of had gone to the East…and seemed different when they returned.” So he and Hilde bus through Budapest, Athens, Turkey and the Middle East to India, where Walter marvels over “how people survived their daily struggle in apparent chaos under harsh conditions.” Later, on a depressive whim, he also visits the Far East, briefly living in a commune and practicing meditation to help him come to terms with his new life as a father and published author. The bulk of Walter’s life, roughly 50 years, is relayed largely through exposition, resulting in dry prose that rarely slows to capture the intense emotions of, for example, Walter’s first sexual encounter or his decision to visit India. Regardless, the book’s dozens of concise chapters, characters and exotic locales—not to mention Walter’s spontaneity—make for a profoundly engaging and unpredictable plot. In Walter, Mitze has created a counterculture-era Siddhartha, a nomadic soul who discovers unexpected meaning in home, friendship and rock ’n’ roll.
A picaresque tale of personal conviction and compassion.Pub Date: March 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481141659
Page Count: 424
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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