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THE BLACK ENVELOPE

Name: THE BLACK ENVELOPE
Author: Norman Manea
ISBN: 0-374-11397-1

by Norman Manea ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1995

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With prose that's alternately tough and tender (Dashiell Hammett meets Rilke), as well as downright wacky, Romanian ÇmigrÇ Manea (Compulsory Happiness, 1993, etc.) offers another of his dense and often caustic views of modern eastern Europe. No one would dispute Manea's skill as a wordsmith—to do so with lines like ``The suspect sun is called Thursday. Still a century to go until Friday'' would be to join the same orchestra of folly that many of his characters play for. But one could easily fault him for laying the metaphors on too thick. It's endlessly difficult here to figure out what's standing in for what. Bucharest, in the throes of a ``happy spring,'' finds Tolea Voinov struggling with a web of vague conspiracy and lingering communist paranoia. Fired from his teaching job, Tolea is working as a receptionist at a hotel while investigating the suspicious death of his father—a Sorbonne-educated philosopher who fled Bucharest with his extensive wine cellar 40 years earlier. The wildly outspoken Tolea becomes more meditative as the novel wears on, and he familiarizes himself with the odd collection of cosmopolitan shut-ins who'll lead him to the photographer whose albums may provide the key to his puzzles. First, however, he must contend with a secret society of deaf-mutes that issues periodic, cryptic reports on his progress. In the classic Stanislaw Lem fashion of Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Manea formulates Tolea's struggle as one pitted against an obsessive, anonymous bureaucracy bent on ensuring that ``nothing gets lost: everything is transformed— signs, substitutes, and invisible networks.'' None of this, though, prevents Tolea from participating in one of fiction's zestier sex scenes, during which he pumps ``the lava of the fiery night'' into a woman who asks him for a match. Nothing new, but the telling is handled in such a preposterously slippery way that it frequently seems so.

Pub Date: June 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-374-11397-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HOOLIGAN’S RETURN
by Norman Manea & translated by Angela Jianu

- BOOK REVIEW
COMPULSORY HAPPINESS
by Norman Manea

- BOOK REVIEW
OCTOBER, EIGHT O'CLOCK
by Norman Manea

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.