by Nuria Amat & translated by Peter Bush ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005
In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.
A disjointed, dreamlike (and prizewinning) tale by Barcelona journalist Amat descends into the coca farms of Bahia Negra, Colombia.
A Marxist journalist on the lam, Wilson Cervantes and his Barcelonian girlfriend, Rat, have taken refuge in a seaside farm village near his aunt Irma’s house. In the midst of a civil war, the impoverished black planters of this jungle region are at the mercy of those who sabotage the land for their own purposes: the corrupt drug dealers, who descend in airplanes to take the result of the farmers’ hard toil, the salt cocaine, and leave a paltry cut; the ruthless guerrillas, who periodically infiltrate the villages for arbitrary executions; and the paramilitary police, who routinely burn and fumigate the coca and poppy farms. “In his life as an ordinary citizen,” Amat intimates obliquely, Wilson “wrote articles that upset both the army and the guerrilla,” and yet the hot, trancelike state the two lovers fall into gradually obliterates both the reasons for their being in Bahia Negra and any motivation for leaving. Wilson intends to write a novel, yet he drinks heavily and writes nothing, while Rat observes the wacky locals, like young Aida, black Poncho’s third wife (actually his daughter), who witnesses the guerrillas murder him and loses her mind. Aida reveals troubling truths about other executions she’s witnessed and leads Rat to the Dead Women’s Well, where the two watch all-night rumba parties in which coca leaves are purposefully pulverized by the intoxicated dancers for the next stage of treatment. The gathering of menacing forces against the defenseless farmers results in a violent conflagration that finally pulls the narrative out of what has seemed a drug-induced stupor. The translation is awkward, complicated by Amat’s penchant for whimsical metaphors, non-sequiturs, and shifting points of view.
In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87286-435-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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