Acclaimed Hungarian novelist Esterh†zy (The Book of Hrabal, 1994, etc.) unevenly combines anecdote and opinion to create a pastiche-portrait of a society in which ``lies'' pervert both the personal and the political. Esterhazy's latest to appear here was written in the early 1980s, in the ``so-called time of transition,'' when Hungarian writers, frustrated by the need to be discreet yet simultaneously lacking the edge the 1950s Stalinist terror paradoxically provided, were at a literary impasse. And while the book describes a particular country and time, it is also all those other places ``where everything is a lie . . . where the lack of democracy is called socialist democracy, revolution anti-revolution and so on.'' These are places with honorable literary antecedents, and though Esterh†zy, the consummate Euro-intellectual, never refers to Orwell or Swift, he is making points similar to theirs as his metafictional commentator and storyteller assembles his social portrait in four sections. First, he describes various sexual encounters—in one a Party official seduces a woman in a train's lavatory—that take place in a world where ``happiness must be squeezed out of life, and no excuse.'' Next, he offers telling anecdotes about politicians and security officers who try, for example, to trap innocent recruits by offering them bribes to prove their power. The third and fourth sections are, respectively, a meditation on survival in a place where ``ways of talking about sex are transferred to the political and societal spheres''; and illustrations of the plight of the writer, Stalin's ``engineer of soul,'' who refuses an invitation for an ``unbridled chat'' on the radio because ``he can't chat unbridled in this country; bridled is the only way he could talk, and that's something he hates.'' Fiction too often pushed into the awkward service of ideas, but still worth the read.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-8101-1340-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
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
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