Brooding and elegant, much against the grain of lighthearted South American love stories like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt...
A culturally sensitive, quite grown-up story of love across class and ethnic lines in South America, where such things do not go unnoticed.
Arana moves from the Peruvian rainforest, the setting of her novel Cellophane (2006), to the nation’s capital—more specifically, to the neighborhoods ringed by tall wrought-iron fences and concrete walls with which the elite keep out the poor. One such hermetic estate is the home of the Bluhm family, German in their hearts though “raised entirely in Spanish, on Creole food, in the heart of the Inca continent.” Bluhm père isn’t rich, and there are tuition fees to pay to keep his children at the best schools, but he’s well enough off that, when opportunity knocks, he’s prepared to accept the class burden of setting up a casa chica (love nest), a mistress and possibly a second family on the side. Enter Maria Fernandez, an underage dancer in a tango bar, a chola (half-breed), dark-skinned and, naturally, a temptress. He hunts her; she hunts him. Bluhm falls, of course, though a friend warns him, “Don’t mess with children.” Maria notes their many differences, including this: “You live in San Isidro and have ancestors you’d like to write about. I live in Lurigancho—I have no idea where my ancestors are from.” No matter. Love ensues, and with it disaster that unfolds over a narrative covering more than two decades, during which the members of Bluhm’s circle become no more inclined than before to embrace indigenes. (One had considered inviting Maria to a fundraiser for the homeless, but “the more she thought about it, the less she could recall seeing dark-skinned people at any of those affairs, except, of course, as staff.”) Suffice it to say that things do not end well, and for complex reasons that Arana, herself Peruvian, explores with psychological awareness and sympathy.
Brooding and elegant, much against the grain of lighthearted South American love stories like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-34258-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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