MEATSPACE

Name: MEATSPACE
Author: Nikesh Shukla
ISBN: 978-0-00-813756-4

by Nikesh Shukla ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2015

Literary and well aware of it, Shukla’s novel is a charming, sometimes-satirical take on the narratives we create about...

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Doubles and dramatic stylistic shifts abound in this novel about a young writer’s misadventures in romance, with his family, and on social media.

Kitab Balasubramanyam, the narrator of Shukla’s (largely) comic and self-aware novel, is a writer with a number of problems: his brother, Aziz, has decamped for an adventure in New York; his father is bothering him for dating advice; and a young man who shares his name has entered his life, sometimes endearingly clueless, sometimes appearing to be a terrifying stalker. Interspersed with Kitab’s story are Aziz’s adventures, which take on a very different tone. Literary references abound, including Will Self and Martin Amis, as well as Kitab’s favorite book, which is strongly implied to be Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. These are all books that a young, edgy writer would likely embrace, but they’re also there for more metafictional reasons. Palahniuk’s penchant for unreliable narrators, Self’s games in worldbuilding, and Amis’ fondness for ambiguity—think, especially, of Money—can all be seen as stylistic antecedents for what Shukla is doing here. And given the array of doubles and doppelgängers, and a meditation on the difference between online identities and our identities in the physical world (hence the novel’s title), Shukla leaves the reader with plenty to ponder. Shukla does a good job of making both the object of Kitab’s affection and his ex-girlfriend characters with their own lives and concerns; this is a novel that shows, but does not share, its narrator’s anxieties. Less successful is the prefacing of all of Kitab’s chapters with his Internet search history. It’s an amusing touch but one that never gets inside his head the way the rest of the novel does.

Literary and well aware of it, Shukla’s novel is a charming, sometimes-satirical take on the narratives we create about ourselves and those around us.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-00-813756-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOOD IMMIGRANT
edited by Nikesh Shukla & Chimene Suleyman

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.