A stylish, jampacked tale that examines love, memory, and international identity.
A professor of Japanese history searches for a long-lost lover while studying the Portuguese diaspora throughout Asia.
Reyes-Ruiz (La Forma de las Cosas, 2016, etc.) crams a wide range of topics into a novel that follows Tomás Rodrigues, a professor at a Roman Catholic university in Tokyo, as he untangles three plotlines: the sudden reappearance of a girlfriend from his youth, a mysterious old text about the adventures of a 16th-century Portuguese man, and anxieties about his academic career. The enigmatic former lover, Monica Klaseen, is the most intriguing of the three threads, and Rodrigues’ search for her becomes the engine that drives the tale forward. After seeing a woman who looks like Klaseen in the airport, the professor faints and forgets the encounter, but is suddenly haunted by strange dreams and recollections of a woman he hasn’t thought about for more than 20 years. When he returns to Japan for the start of the new school year, he is unable to forget Klaseen, even though he has to navigate departmental politics, a new research project, and his relationship with his ex-wife. That’s a lot of content for a relatively slim 175 pages, but there are essentially two major themes. The first focuses on the difficulty of finding a sense of home in an international world. Rodrigues is a Portuguese-Colombian with Australian citizenship teaching in Japan, battling the stigma against foreigners while investigating the origins of that bias through research. The second delves into the inconsistency of memory and history; Rodrigues constantly struggles to separate truth and falsehood as he parses the imperial past and his own experiences. In addressing this latter point, the novel occasionally trips over itself. Rodrigues’ bout of short-term amnesia at the book’s outset is a curious episode that ultimately feels unnecessary. Stylistically, Reyes-Ruiz’s subject matter and prose evoke a number of comparisons: Haruki Murakami’s ambiguous atmosphere, the virile professor narratives of Philip Roth, and the post-colonial preoccupations of Amitav Ghosh. Fans of any of these authors should find something to like here, but the book may prove especially appealing to anyone looking to learn about an underappreciated dimension of the colonial experience, the Portuguese exploration of Asia.
A stylish, jampacked tale that examines love, memory, and international identity.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-891270-26-0
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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