Moving along the romancer’s boundary between anger and nostalgia, Fiona’s story is, overall, well crafted and elegant,...
A somewhat heavy-handed second from Irish-American McBride (The Nature of Water and Air, 2001).
When Fiona O’Faolain moved from rural Ireland to Santa Fe, New Mexico, it wasn’t so much to get ahead in the world as to find out who she was. An illegitimate child, Fiona was fathered by a well-known photographer who had come to the American Southwest years before and made his reputation there. Although he helped support Fiona and her mother, Jane, while Fiona was a girl, he never married Jane—thus condemning her to the status of eccentric outsider in the rural village where she and Fiona lived. A gifted seamstress and lacemaker, Jane made a living by creating wedding dresses, and each masterwork only reinforced her disappointment at never becoming Ronan’s bride—to such an extent that she eventually married the dull Ned McGinty, who had been deeply in love with Jane for years. When Ronan dies and leaves part of his estate to Fiona, she moves to Santa Fe to open a dress shop of her own. There, she meets Carlos Aragon, a Spanish antiquities dealer who is restoring a 15th-century statue that had been carved to commemorate a ship that sank off the coast of Ireland with one of his ancestors aboard. According to family legend, Carlos’s ancestor had been rescued by a trio of women and literally nursed back to health on a remote island known as the Land of Women. As Carlos delves deeper into the mysteries of the statue and the doomed ship, Fiona’s thoughts turn back to her native land—and to Michael, her first love.
Moving along the romancer’s boundary between anger and nostalgia, Fiona’s story is, overall, well crafted and elegant, though it becomes a bit overdone and precious in the end.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2888-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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