Heg's only collection of short fiction (originally published in 1990) shows yet another facet of the versatile sensibility responsible for such intriguing previous novels as The History of Danish Dreams (1995) and Smilla's Sense of Snow (1993). The eight tales here deal variously (as an author's note declares) with ``love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929.'' That linkage is gimmicky, but it does enable Heg to set these often fancifully symbolic stories firmly within a context of political and economic ferment and approaching European war. For example, ``Journey into a Dark Heart'' leads a young Danish mathematician toward understanding the motives guiding the European conquest of Africa through the mediation of a fellow train passenger who reveals himself as journalist and former sea captain Joseph Korzeniowski (i.e., Joseph Conrad). Elsewhere, a ballet dancer tells of an ideal love that becomes a disillusioning ``encounter with reality''; a respected judge confesses his love for a young homosexual he's convicted of immorality; and the citizens of an insular town renowned for their love of children are transformed by a smallpox epidemic and the arrival of a grotesque reality instructor. Heg's richly colored stories, which aspire to the epigrammatic concision of the fable, are offered as an obvious homage to the baroque fiction of his great countrywoman and predecessor Isak Dinesen. But their often unduly feverish machinations bring them closer in spirit to the dandyish early fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Still, two of the tales are superlative: ``An Experiment on the Constancy of Love,'' in which a glacially beautiful physicist succumbs to emotions ``that physics would never be capable of explaining''; and ``Story of a Marriage,'' a brilliantly developed account of an outwardly perfect marriage doomed by a curse to incarnate (as another story puts it) ``the truth about love. . . that there comes a day when it is over.'' An accomplished and provocative debut collection from one of the world's least predictable writers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-27254-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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