Cerebral yet heartfelt exercise in connecting unlikely dots.
Russian director commandeers a woman’s dreams, forcing her to redefine her tortured notions of family, in Cooley’s second (after The Archivist, 1998).
Camilla Archer, daughter of deceased master perfumer Jordan Archer, should be happy. The owner of a theatrical curio shop in Manhattan, she’s enjoying a playful affair with consummate handyman Nick. Her group includes Stuart, a wisecracking gay mentor, her ex-husband Sam (they split because she didn’t want children) and her cousin Eve’s daughter, Danny. But Camilla’s dreams are being stage-managed by a mysterious masked figure who will be revealed as the spirit-essence of Vsevolod (“Seva”) Meyerhold, a Soviet theater director eliminated in a Stalinist purge. He designs Camilla’s dream-plays in order to groom her as a worthy repository of Meyerhold’s contrary imagination, which calls for the expression of sorrow through cartwheels and taking roles as sad but ebullient commedia dell’ arte characters. These unsettling nocturnal events prod Camilla to come clean with her intimates, whose fierce loyalty to our prickly and recalcitrant heroine is rendered believable by Cooley’s assured yet unassuming eloquence. What does Camilla, at age 50, have to hide? Plenty—like having assisted, 20 years earlier, in the suicide of her terminally ill father. Eve, whom Camilla grew up with (and who has now recently died of meningitis), was always obsessed with Jordan, and even now Camilla (whose birth—unplanned—caused her mother’s death) still harbors resentment of Jordan’s seeming preference for Eve, a reference that may have resulted in the quasi-incestuous coupling that may have resulted in Danny. Though visceral imagery and scented symbols infuse and deepen the narrative, there are times when the interludes of Meyerhold’s real-life ordeal threaten to trivialize the present-day story. Still, motifs of artful disguise and neglectful or surrogate parentage intersect like nested Russian dolls as these curiously joined lives play out in an atmosphere as insular and fractious as that created by a cell of feuding Bolsheviks.
Cerebral yet heartfelt exercise in connecting unlikely dots.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-15901-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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