This knotty, labyrinthine tale fails to add up to more than its parts.
A novel about love, desire, loss, and revenge in a small Israeli settlement.
There’s a story Ruta Tavori likes to tell about her family: soon after her grandfather Ze’ev, a young man, came from Galilee to start a new life in a newly settled moshava, his brother arrived in a wagon, bringing for him all the things one needs to start a life: a basalt stone to build a house, “a rifle, a cow, a tree, and a woman.” “This is important,” Ruta says. “You have no idea how many times I heard that story, and always in that order.” The woman at the end of that list became Ze’ev’s wife. The violence that soon takes place between them has far-reaching effects on their immediate family and the surrounding community for generations to come. For Ruta has had a tragedy of her own, and she soon tells it: 12 years ago, her 6-year-old son, on a hike with her husband, was bitten by a snake and died. Ruta tells these stories, which are connected, though it isn’t clear yet how, in overlapping, intertwining chapters that move back and forth in time. She is a chatty, sometimes-sarcastic narrator, and she comments on the role of the storyteller as she goes along. As she says to the historian who has come to interview her, “we of all people know that over time only what is written becomes true, and what is spoken doesn’t.” Shalev (My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, 2011, etc.), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Israel’s Brenner Prize, has concocted a layered, circuitous narrative, ample with emotion. The problem is the sculpting and the pacing of that emotion. The book seems to sag beneath its weight. So many fine details are included (inane chatter between Ruta and her historian, for example) that they begin to crowd out the larger—much larger—story. That means that the denouement feels rushed and the emotional resolution unearned. Shalev may be a force to be reckoned with, but his latest work still leaves something wanting.
This knotty, labyrinthine tale fails to add up to more than its parts.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-805-24329-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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