Olafsson’s emotionally chilly tale raises interesting questions about the capacity and limits of science and about how hard...
In Olafsson’s fifth novel (Restoration, 2012, etc.), set in a rarified world of high-achieving intellectuals and artists, a neuroscientist attempts to unravel mysteries in his personal history as he recovers from a tragedy.
Magnus grew up in England but now lives in Manhattan and commutes to a hospital in Cold Harbor, Connecticut, where he works on a project studying human consciousness in seemingly comatose patients. As the novel opens, he describes being put into an artificial state of physical paralysis for two hours just to experience it. Unable to move or communicate, he hears the sea outside his open window for the first time since his lover, Malena, visited him at the hospital the previous fall, a moment when he “should have known from her voice that something was wrong.” Malena, an Argentinean who taught modern dance at Julliard, has since died under cloudy circumstances that Magnus spends the rest of the novel trying to fathom. In elliptical snatches he recalls their intense affair, which he repeatedly claims was close to idyllic. While still mourning Malena, Magnus is thrust back into interaction with his parents, Vincent and Margaret, whom he reluctantly agrees to visit at their home in Hertfordshire for his mother’s 70th birthday. Both Vincent and Margaret have always believed that emotionally fragile Margaret is a musical genius whose virtuosity on the piano has been cruelly ignored. Vincent comes across as a pathetic charlatan who pours cheap bubbly into expensive champagne bottles. Magnus has always felt that Margaret, who showed him little maternal affection when he was a child, blamed him for her lack of success. When Margaret becomes something of a media sensation after Vincent releases her new recordings, Magnus begins to questions his perspective on his childhood. Meanwhile he begins to work with a new patient, a woman who appears to be comatose but may understand more than she lets on.
Olafsson’s emotionally chilly tale raises interesting questions about the capacity and limits of science and about how hard it is to know another person, but for all its braininess the novel never develops a beating heart.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-267748-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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