bookshelf

SMELL

Name: SMELL
Author: Radhika Jha
ISBN: 1-56947-241-6

by Radhika Jha ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001

Still, newcomer Jha offers a detailed look at an immigrant’s life in Paris, both its hardships and pleasures.

bookshelf

The difficult journey to independence of a young Gujarati woman with a remarkable sense of smell.

When Leela’s father is killed in a riot, her family decides to leave their adopted home of Kenya. At 18, Leela is sent to live with relatives in Paris, while her mother and two brothers go to England, promising to retrieve her as soon as they’re settled. Leela soon realizes that her mother, who has quickly remarried, has no intention of sending for her, leaving Leela to manage in the unhappy household of her aunt and uncle. Used to a privileged life back in Africa, where she was preparing for university, she now finds herself cooking vast, complex Indian meals for a thankless aunt and helping her uncle in his small market. When Leela is thrown out (after revealing, in a fit of anger, how her uncle entertains his female customers), she’s fortunate enough to be taken in by a glamorous, well-connected model who refers to Leela as her “Indian friend.” Leela then finds a position as an au pair—and of course also a position as the father’s mistress. Throughout the story, it's Leela’s refined sense of smell that teaches her about her new country and the people in it, enabling her to create the most sublime culinary works. It also enables—and plagues—her with the ability to smell her own shame. She learns French and gradually makes friends, but only when she becomes mistress to a rich and powerful man does she learn the importance of identity—something she’s been sorely lacking. Most of the narrative has little to do with choices Leela actually makes and much to do with her luck in meeting influential people. The close, when she finally chooses a life of her own, comes not a moment too soon.

Still, newcomer Jha offers a detailed look at an immigrant’s life in Paris, both its hardships and pleasures.

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-56947-241-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.