An awkward and agenda-heavy novel, the second this season on the subject of the French Revolution (see Tanith Lee, above). In an author's note, Piercy (The Longings of Women, 1994, etc.), a self-described woman of the left and feminist, declares that she wanted to write about the Revolution and a ``society in crisis''—18th-century France—that might ``illuminate our own situation.'' While the rich in the US may be getting richer and the poor more desperate, however, the US still isn't Royalist France, so the comparisons are less than persuasive. Still, the stories Piercy's six characters—three of them women—tell are vivid, if marred by clichÇs and colloquialisms (``They're guys just like in the neighborhood''). The narrators, all based on prominent historical figures, include ``Max'' Robespierre, the ascetic absolutist who created the Reign of Terror; Georges Danton, the ebullient orator; Nicholas Condorcet, an intellectual inspired by the example of the American Revolution; Claire Lacombe, an actress and activist; Pauline LÇon, a chocolate-maker who organized the women; and Manon Roland, whose famous last words were, ``Ah, liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.'' Alternate chapters describe the characters' early lives and their revolutionary roles. Max, who heard his mother die in childbirth, resolved never to have children; Claire ran away from home to escape becoming a laundress like her own mother; Pauline, who grew up poor, married an affluent army officer; Nicholas was an aristocrat who broke with his class; Manon used her intellectual talents to further her husband's career; and Georges wanted to retire to his native province and raise a family. All six witness or participate in events like the storming of the Bastille. But as the ``Revolution begins to eat its children,'' they are caught up in the violence. Only Claire and Pauline survive in a France that is altered, somewhat improved, but still flawed. Dickens did it better. (Quality Paperback Book club featured alternate selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-449-91268-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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