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
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Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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