Though at times haphazard in its translation, a bold contribution to erotic literature.
A rare thing: an erotic novel from the contemporary Muslim world, written by a woman to boot.
The pseudonymous Nedjma’s autobiographical story (published originally in French) follows a young Moroccan woman’s sexual life—from adolescent lesbian explorations on to the passionate affaire de coeur of adulthood, along with the disastrous marriage in between. In rural Imchouk, where she was raised, teenaged Badra is married off to the town’s notary, a middle-aged bore who has already renounced two wives for their failure to bear him a child. Neither does Badra have luck conceiving, and after a few years of being treated no better than a womb in waiting, she runs away to Tangiers to live with her modern, imposing Aunt Selma. At one of the many society parties the two attend, Badra meets Driss, a wealthy doctor and a sexual hurricane with a Pygmalion complex. Badra makes his seduction easy, and the two embark on a ten-year affair in a culture where women are either married or virgins. It’s the 1960s, and Tangiers is filled with rich hippies and rock stars, mini skirts and whiskey, but, as always with erotica, the world shrinks to the confines of the bedroom. Badra’s escapades are hardly awakenings to a repressed sexuality (in flashbacks to her life in Imchouk, she tells of being fascinated by the town’s whores, of being groped by a stranger and loving it, of hoping that one day her vagina would be the most beautiful in the world). Instead, her adventures are affirmations of what she always knew her body deserved. At once crude and elegant, the novel succeeds in keeping to that thin line between the obscene and the sensual. The minutiae of a body’s sexual functions often make for laughable prose, but Nedjma glorifies the sex act, raises it to the station of a religious ecstasy, something akin to a prayer.
Though at times haphazard in its translation, a bold contribution to erotic literature.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1805-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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