Elegant fun, and one of the most enjoyable “serious” novels in many seasons.
Visions of Italo Calvino’s seminal postmodernist romp Invisible Cities arise as the reader enters the cleverly fabricated world of this novel, originally published in French in 2004, from Rolin (Paper Tiger, 2007, etc.).
The book’s modus operandi is explained in a mock-editorial foreword declaring that “each [chapter] describes a hotel room in minute detail…then goes on to relate an anecdote involving the author and this particular location.” Thus protagonist and narrator “Olivier Rolin” trots around the globe fulfilling miscellaneous diplomatic and criminal missions, indulging varied sophisticated tastes, including gratifying dalliances with often exotic, occasionally dangerous women—a blissful exception being his “ever-endangered” girlfriend Mélanie. Our antihero gets awfully cozy with “discount dictators” trafficking in WMDs and other bad stuff, but he’s basically an amiable thrill seeker who prefers uninterrupted creature comforts to inconvenient derring-do. Individual episodes offer differing degrees of smash-mouth action and risibility. It’s hard to top an adventure in Helsinki where Olivier recovers from “a brawl over the interpretation of the Sibelius concerto for violin in D minor with some sailors in a bar.” But we are treated to a Catholic plot to convert Muslims by bombarding them with “religious trinkets”; a Siberian scheme to clone mammoths from prehistoric DNA and sell the hybrid beasts to U.S. theme parks; a weird rescue operation accomplished in Hanoi’s Natural History Museum; and an eye-popping sex scene performed under a table in a Montreal restaurant. An extra dimension emerges in Olivier’s pilgrimages to locales associated with favorite writers, and due homage is paid to such prankish experimentalists as countrymen Boris Vian, Henri Michaux and Georges Perec (who, the foreword explains, was this book’s major inspiration).
Elegant fun, and one of the most enjoyable “serious” novels in many seasons.Pub Date: May 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56478-492-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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