AUTOPSY OF A FATHER

Name: AUTOPSY OF A FATHER
Author: Pascale Kramer
ISBN: 978-1-942658-24-5

by Pascale Kramer ; translated by Robert Bononno ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017

A timely if sketchily drawn look at the rise of bigotry and the ways racial and ethnic tensions play out in one French...

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When Ania returns to Les Épinettes for her estranged father’s funeral, she discovers that a political brouhaha has erupted in the latest novel by Swiss writer Kramer (The Child, 2012, etc.).

Unbeknownst to her, her dad, Gabriel, a prominent left-wing radio journalist, had recently been fired from his job. The termination, Ania learns, followed an on-air diatribe in which the 57-year-old had voiced support for two white Frenchmen who had brutally—and for no apparent reason—murdered an African immigrant. Ania had heard nothing about the well-publicized incident before returning to her childhood village. In fact, the apolitical Ania has been living in a near bubble since leaving home decades earlier. Her day-to-day routines have been simple: she goes to work and cares for her young son, Theo. As a divorced single mom, Ania is content to keep her nose to the grindstone. Her lack of civic engagement, however, ends when news of Gabriel’s suicide reaches her. Not only does she have to process this abrupt loss, she also has to grapple with her father's festering racism. In addition, she has to interact with her father’s wife, Clara, an efficient, cosmopolitan professional who is about her own age. The proximity grates, especially since Ania and Gabriel had never been close or confided in one another. As the back story unfolds, the novel delves into anti-immigrant sentiment and the resentments that have erupted between newcomers and longtime European residents. It’s fraught, and the violence lurking beneath the surface is palpable. At the same time, the father-daughter tensions are revealed in fits and starts and never fully gel. We learn, for example, that Ania’s mom died in an accident, but whether Gabriel had a hand in this remains unclear.

A timely if sketchily drawn look at the rise of bigotry and the ways racial and ethnic tensions play out in one French community and family.

Pub Date: July 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-942658-24-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TOM'S CROSSING
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.