A multilayered love story, cloaked in a demanding writing style that masks the true nature of the plot.
A stylistically intense series of vignettes chronicle the life, love and matchless intellect of a woman who is an expert on medieval courtly literature.
Shapiro’s 84 vignettes center around Lady Murasaki, an intellectual who is overlooked and underestimated by her peers, and the love of her life, Prince Towa no Ai. The two journey through swiftly changing locales as numerous historical and literary characters move in and out of the narrative, from Pontius Pilate and Yeshua to the devilish Bolcitan and The Cat. The interactions between the characters provide setup after setup for Lady Murasaki to pontificate on her areas of expertise, answering questions and debating points with enthusiasm and great detail. Topics include Dante’s work (the character of Beatrice in particular), “Il Cortegiano,” Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian history, epic poetry, ballet and a divergence into modern social commentary in a look at “Wimp English.” Interspersed within these scenes are stream-of-consciousness lists, imagery and snippets of other scenes. The book is extremely talky, making it short on dramatic tension. Shapiro’s work is most engaging when he sticks to a narrative, as the final scenes between Lady Murasaki and Prince Towa no Ai are especially tender and moving. The rigorously demanding writing style will likely push most readers far beyond their comfort zone and compel them to keep a dictionary close at hand. Those who do soldier on until the end will be rewarded with the “Postilla Epistolaria,” Shapiro’s notes/correspondence on the vignettes. Here, the author informs that Lady Murasaki is based on his late wife Marianne and her experiences in academia, and explains that the characters so brutally revenged upon in the book are based on real individuals. This final section is as illuminating as viewing the top of a puzzle box which bears a completed picture, after having confusedly mulled over 1,000 random puzzle pieces. In this respect, Shapiro successfully motivates readers to reread specific passages with fresh eyes.
A multilayered love story, cloaked in a demanding writing style that masks the true nature of the plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4196-4753-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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