Crystalline and spare, this tale nevertheless packs substantial heat in its passionate embrace of youthful ideals and...
A romantic story etched as delicately as frost on a windowpane, this French bestseller from 1999 about a young Japanese poet’s path to wisdom is Fermine’s lyrical US debut.
At 17, near the end of the 19th century, Yuko has gone into the mountains of his native Hokkaido for inspiration and returned to his monk father with the decision that he will devote his life to writing haiku. Forced by his father to reconsider, he returns to the wilderness in winter and comes back determined to write only about snow. This Yuko does for several years, using the most ethereal of poetic forms to extol the virtues of that most ethereal of elements; then one day the Imperial Poet comes to call, having caught wind of this young purist. The Poet is impressed, but he’s also struck by the whiteness in Yuko’s poems and urges Yuko to find color. Two years later—during this interval, Yuko discovers the sensual delights of lovemaking—the Poet returns, this time with a mysterious young woman to offer the snowbound youth training at the hands of the Poet’s own aged mentor, Soseki. Yuko agrees, and walks south to find the old man; enroute, he discovers a beautiful European woman frozen in the ice high in the mountains. Marveling at this, he reaches Soseki’s house, where he learns that the great master is blind. Despite reservations about what teachings such a man can offer him about color, Yuko perseveres; as a result, he is able to make the connection between his discovery in the mountains and Soseki, one that allows the old master to die happily and Yuko to fulfill his talent and find love.
Crystalline and spare, this tale nevertheless packs substantial heat in its passionate embrace of youthful ideals and matters of the heart.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5684-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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