Faber marches on, establishing himself as one of the most versatile fiction writers working today.
Fully drawn characters and arresting premises in three vivid, varied tales, courtesy of the Dutch-born Scottish author best known for his Victorian historical The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).
“The Fahrenheit Twins” is a modern (perhaps futuristic) fairy tale in which the sibling offspring of anthropological researchers on an Arctic archipelago grow up benignly neglected and ignored by their respective parents. The death of their mother plunges the children (Tainto’lilith and her brother Marko’cain) into a “ritual” burial voyage that’s also an odyssey of discovery and shedding of illusions about adults and about their own relationship to the natural world they labor to quantify and understand. “The Hundred Ninety-Nine Steps” focuses on Sian, a 30-ish archaeological conservator working on a dig at an abbey graveyard in the English seaside village of Whitby. Burdened by grievous injuries sustained in war-torn Bosnia and by a recurring “dream of being first seduced, then murdered,” Sian achieves a paradoxical understanding of her limitations and her potential through an unresolved flirtation with a handsome young doctor and her deciphering of an 18th-century “scroll” whose “confession” starkly illustrates her own world’s distance from a bygone one sustained by social convention and religious faith. This beautifully plotted story displays strengths even more impressively evident in the title novella, the story of a labor undertaken by “the seventh most-renowned serious vocal ensemble in the world.” Ensconced in a Belgian chateau, the five members of the eponymous a cappella consort rehearse eccentric postmodernist composer Pino Fugazza’s exasperatingly intricate “Partitum Mutante,” a portentous musical allegory of (among other things) the birthing process. Faber’s elegant tale deftly traces relationships among the embattled singers, particularly the consort director’s wife, soprano Catherine Courage, as the “Partitum” and her surroundings expose her own emotional divisions and needs. It’s a most unusual story, and a brilliant achievement.
Faber marches on, establishing himself as one of the most versatile fiction writers working today.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101061-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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