A strange but lavishly imagined tale of a hard-to-describe feeling.
A wealthy eccentric travels through Europe and South America hunting for the nature of melancholy.
Haber’s debut novel (Deathbed Conversions: Stories, 2008) concerns Jacov Reinhardt, a Croatian-born heir to a tobacco fortune who has a bottomless appetite for cocaine and an intense compulsion to understand “that most elusive of emotions: melancholy, not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade...an enigmatic realm.” Is Jacov on a valid intellectual pursuit or a cokehead’s crackpot adventure? Like the mood itself, the novel stakes a kind of middle ground, but that’s an asset: The story is contemplative yet open to absurdity. The book opens in 1907 in the jungle outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, where Jacov and his assistants (including the narrator) are hunting for a scholar of melancholy who reputedly lives in the region. But the narrator soon leaps into the past, recalling his 11-year relationship with Jacov, encompassing Jacov's experiences of losing his twin sister at 9 years old, a stint in a sanitarium, a detour into Stuttgart (where he constructed a castle “that evokes the unfulfilled longing of life"), and a trip to Russia to, basically, stalk Leo Tolstoy. With a philosophical bent and nary a paragraph break, the novel evokes Gertrude Stein, contemporary European and South American writers like Matthias Énard, Roberto Bolaño, and César Aira, with the Quixotic atmosphere of Werner Herzog films like Fitzcarraldo. Regardless of influence, it’s broad-minded, intellectual stuff but not oppressively so; the story is rich with stemwinders on the intersection of melancholy with lust, religion, debauchery, and more. Is Jacov mad? At least a little, especially once the truth about that scholar of melancholy becomes clear. But in form and language, his story entertainingly evokes the mood it’s chasing: interior, mercurial, implacable.
A strange but lavishly imagined tale of a hard-to-describe feeling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-56689-562-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fast, feel-good story about finding happiness.
A woman attempts to overhaul her life with the help of an unconventional therapist in Giordano’s debut.
Camille is a 30-something Parisian woman with a husband, son, and a good job. She has security, love, and everything she needs—so why does she feel bored and unhappy? When she has a minor car accident during a storm, she stumbles into the home of a man who, conveniently, offers to help her fix her life. Claude deduces that Camille is suffering from a case of acute routinitis, a “sickness of the soul” that means she’s dissatisfied, unmotivated, and unhappy even though she has everything she needs. Claude, as a routinologist, devises an unconventional course of treatment for Camille, one that has her completing some tasks that are simple (such as spring cleaning her house) and some that are slightly odder (such as riding in a hot air balloon) to transform her life. Although Claude’s methods are unusual, Camille hopes they will help her find a deeper connection with her husband and son and perhaps even a better understanding of herself. Giordano has created a quick and light read, but without much information about Camille’s backstory, it’s hard to get invested in her transformation. Claude presents interesting ideas about philosophy and personal growth, but none of them are explored with much complexity. Although it lacks depth at times, it may be a good pick for readers who are looking for a lighter take on Eat, Pray, Love.
A fast, feel-good story about finding happiness.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53559-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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