by Peter Handke & translated by Krishna Winston ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2007
Yeats called it “the fascination of what’s difficult.” Nobody writing today surpasses Peter Handke at trying to make sense...
A complex quest for meaning enriches and encumbers this novel, originally published in Europe in 2000, from the prolific Austrian novelist, playwright and essayist.
Handke’s innovative plays and meditative novels (On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, 2000, etc.) have made him a perennial Nobel candidate, even as his books have increasingly shifted their emphases from characterization and narrative to loquacious introspection. This newest fiction shows him at his best and worst. Its protagonist, an unnamed woman who has achieved great success as a banker in an unspecified European country, recapitulates a journey made years earlier by traveling through the eponymous mountain range (in Spain) to meet the famous author she has commissioned to write her biography. At every way station, she encounters dispiriting evidence of the commercialized, distinctly unromantic, unheroic world from which she desires escape. It’s not accidental that the biographer-to-be hails from La Mancha. Nor is it surprising that every bit of information she imparts to him is repeatedly qualified, questioned or contradicted—by the man from La Mancha’s questions and by the interruptions of a hectoring narrative voice. The result is a work that embraces a disciplined attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the matter of everyday life (before it vanishes forever?), and a species of literate wool-gathering which seems to confirm Handke’s frequently reiterated assertion that all that exists is grist for the artist’s mill. Embracing and transcending the limits of individual perceptions of objective reality: It’s the dilemma into—and out of which—Handke’s cerebral worrywarts persistently write themselves.
Yeats called it “the fascination of what’s difficult.” Nobody writing today surpasses Peter Handke at trying to make sense of it all.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-28154-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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SEEN & HEARD
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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