Splendid, with notable film potential.
Another absorbing and poignant first novel (after Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng, 2000) about the life journey of the first Siamese twins in recorded history.
Slouka (stories: Lost Lake, 1998, etc.) begins his tale in Civil War North Carolina with Chang, the point-of-view character here, reflecting on a life spent bonded to his brother Eng. The fresh images and fascinating allusions in his narrative bring to vivid life Siam, Paris, London, New York City, and the American South during the first half of the 19th century. Chang first contemplates the day over fifty years before when he and his brother, joined at the shoulders by “a small, fleshy bridge,” horrified midwives in Siam. With scant attention to the ways the boys accommodate each other, Chang remembers their warm childhood. When a typhoon takes their father’s life, the maturing twins are forced to accept an entrepreneur’s offer to become a traveling theatrical attraction in Europe. Parisians regard them as beautiful, a special gift of God. Chang falls rapturously in love with one of them, Sophia Marchant, while Eng patiently reads on at Chang’s side. Then a friend suggests to Chang that Marchant’s attraction springs from a fetish with the abnormal. The devastating news follows that the twins are destitute, their managers having vanished. Fleeing to the fetid streets of London, the two grub for coins by allowing passers-by to touch their attachment. An agent for P.T. Barnum rescues them, offering work in New York City. Here, Eng’s growing preoccupation with religion threatens the brothers’ bond, as does the oncoming Civil War. The conflict between them over bringing slaves into their homes escalates into a physical quarrel that leaves both of them nearly dead. Yet when Eng ultimately comforts Chang, bereft from the disappearance of his beloved son in the war, their brotherly bond survives.
Splendid, with notable film potential.Pub Date: May 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40216-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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