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KNIFE EDGE

Name: KNIFE EDGE
Author: Ralf Rothmann
ISBN: 0-8112-1204-1

by Ralf Rothmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 1992

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German poet Rothmann's first is a poet's novel—spare, elliptical, shot through with recurring images and strong descriptive passages. The narrative moves lightly and briskly, the characters have sharp outlines but no depth. Translated now (at times with excessive literalness), the book reads like an artifact of the late cold war years, a symptom rather than a real exploration of attitudes current in Germany ca. 1986. It's a time, in West Berlin, of violent demonstrations against the huge buildup of American nuclear stockpiles in Germany. The hero takes no part in the protests, although he does give shelter briefly to fugitives from police brutality. His heart's in the right place; he just can't act on his convictions. He's a halfhearted writer, a part-time cab driver, the last holdover tenant in a building being gentrified: in short, a hanger-on, a dangling man, an old familiar note from the underground. Then he falls in love with a beauty named Iris. They vacation in Tuscany. She gets pregnant. But during the crucial act of love in an Italian meadow, the hero is watching a farm family down the hill slaughter a pig. Life and death, women's menstrual blood, and men's attraction to bloodshed, all are recurring themes. But it's hard to tell when Rothmann is mocking trendy clichÇs about nurturing woman vs. murderous man, and when he's being serious. His hero drops a trail of leaden aphorisms. Sometimes they're rebutted, too often they're left to stand. In the end, Rothmann's hero can't commit himself either to fatherhood or violence, although he thinks of stabbing a brutal, arrogant American soldier. When the poet describes a Turkish street-sweeper, an Italian farmer, a Berlin sunset, he's vivid and suggestive. When he turns inward, his vision is clouded by last week's newspaper and the whole existentialist bookshelf. In all: Ann Beattie with an overlay of Middle European angst.

Pub Date: May 27, 1992

ISBN: 0-8112-1204-1

Page Count: 128

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TO DIE IN SPRING
by Ralf Rothmann ; translated by Shaun Whiteside

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.