A page-turner in spite of its clunky and cliché-ridden self.
Another emotionally compelling tale that celebrates undying love as two young superheroes overcome bombing raids, starvation, and treacherous friends in Leningrad under siege by the Germans.
As in so many other oversized books of its genre, the lovers here are at the mercy of a plot that strains credulity as it ratchets up the tensions and exploits the passions. When Alexander Belov and Tatiana meet in the summer of 1941, he’s an officer in the Red Army, while she’s a 17-year-old factory worker living in a crowded apartment with her elder sister Dasha, her twin brother Pasha, her parents and grandparents. Alexander is courting Dasha, but Tatiana and he are soon in love. It’s a love they can’t declare, however, because Alexander has a dangerous secret—and a dangerous friend. Alexander in fact is really an American who, as a child in the early 1930s, came to Russia with his idealistic parents. They soon soured on Communism, and, as the Trials began, were arrested. His mother was shot, his father died in prison, but not before Alexander persuaded classmate Dimitri, whose own father was a prison guard, to allow him to see Dad one last time. In return, Alexander promised to take Dimitri to America whenever they found an opportunity to escape to nearby Finland. But Dimitri, with more lives than a cat, is a bad guy and threatens throughout to betray Alexander whenever Alexander seems to be reneging on their plans. When the siege begins, Tatiana is badly wounded in a bombing attack. Recovered, she starts working at a hospital, and, though her family dies one by one as the food supplies dwindle and winter sets in, she survives. Somehow she escapes the city to enjoy a lovers’ idyll with Alexander—only to return to face even graver threats.
A page-turner in spite of its clunky and cliché-ridden self.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019926-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
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.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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