This is engrossing and enjoyable despite its minor flaws. Strong, appealing protagonists and an unusual plot make Byrne’s...
Byrne’s debut novel may be the most inventive tale to come along in years.
Decades in the future, two young women begin their separate journeys in parallel storylines: Mariama travels east across the Sahara, while Meena walks west from India to Djibouti on a trail that crosses the Arabian Sea. That high-tech construction is designed to harness the sea’s energy and is technically off-limits to the public, but a few people travel on it and never return. Have they all perished? Meena will take the risk, since she feels compelled to find the place where her parents were murdered, perhaps to confront their murderer; Mariama’s goal is less clear. That the two women will eventually meet is obvious, but the outcome and its significance are not. Meena is running away from people whose identities are as unclear as the reason for the five snakebites on her chest or the kreen that lives inside her—perhaps a snake, perhaps a demon. The story gets confusing as reality alternates with vivid hallucinations, but it’s easy to shrug off the confusion and enjoy the wild ride. Byrne’s wonderful imagination makes the trek across the open sea appear almost plausible, as Meena carries such items as desalinators, a protective pod and diapers cleaned by the sun. In vivid scenes, both women become intensely aware of their sexuality, an important aspect of their stories. The writing is often brilliant, as Byrne paints wholly believable pictures of worlds and cultures most Westerners will never know. Slightly less believable is the dramatic conclusion, even though Byrne does not stint on imagination.
This is engrossing and enjoyable despite its minor flaws. Strong, appealing protagonists and an unusual plot make Byrne’s literary invention well worth the reader’s while.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3884-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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