Broken relationships and damaging silences, presented from deliberately misleading angles, add up to a readable, clever,...
A tricky tale of deceptions—some well-meant—and infidelities winds together an attractive woman’s fractured love life and an open-hearted man’s intense attachment to a child.
Passions run deep in noted British writer Samson’s U.S. debut, a novel which opens with the brutal end of Julia's marriage to Chris and her escape into the arms of her younger lover, gifted literature student Julian. Julian will drop out of college to support Julia when they discover she's pregnant, though a miscarriage follows. Julian’s subsequent life as a writer, Julia’s as a landscape designer, their move to an idyllic cottage called Firdaws where Julian spent his childhood, the birth of their daughter, Mira, and the child's sudden, terrible illness are just a few of the ensuing events, narrated by Samson in four acts spanning 23 years and conveyed from various perspectives. While the first and last sections are brief, the middle two are expansive, the second verging on baggy, allowing the author ample space for a looping narrative that repeatedly tantalizes the reader about events and expectations, moving back and forth within the story’s timeline and delivering the facts in sly drips at unexpected intervals. The technique is provocative, as are some of the plot swerves—a car crash; a withdrawal into silence for many years; an assumption of adultery—all of which play crucial roles. With its sensuous prose and blend of romance, disappointment, amazing sex, and exquisite domestic interiors, the novel hovers somewhere between conventional commercial fiction and something rather more ambitious.
Broken relationships and damaging silences, presented from deliberately misleading angles, add up to a readable, clever, teasing, but naggingly overcomplicated story.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-067-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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