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VILNIUS POKER

Name: VILNIUS POKER
Author: Ricardas Gavelis
ISBN: 978-1-934824-05-4

by Ricardas Gavelis and translated by Elizabeth Novickas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2009

Think of it as The Matrix behind the Iron Curtain—unsettling and profoundly interesting.

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Feverish novel about life in the closing days of Soviet-ruled Lithuania—though just who’s in charge doesn’t matter, since it’s always Them.

Gavelis (1950–2002), a physicist by profession, wrote this novel from 1979 to 1987, publishing it in that magical year 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Empire began its collapse; this is the first time the book has been translated into English. Gavelis’ vision, prescient in several respects and perhaps absurd in others, recalls both the alternate worlds of Stanislas Lem (and, for that matter, Richard Price) and the acerbity of Vilnius-born Csezlaw Milosz. Its protagonist/antihero, Vytautas Vargalys, has done a spell in the Gulag and been repaid for that injustice with a busywork job that pays the bills but has no meaning: He is a digital archivist in a library that no one is allowed to visit or consult. “But,” he says, “there is an ordinary world too, the real world; you always return to it, you’ll never escape it—just as you’ll never escape from Them.” Obsessed by the female form (“I was a headless stuffed dummy, a doll drowsing on a bed of dreamy breasts”), among other things, Vytautas finds it ever more difficult to distinguish reality from the hallucinogenic world that lies behind his eyes. What he is sure of, however, is that They are in charge, and the rest of his compatriots and indeed the citizens of the world have ignored Them because they are bombarded with “impressions, images, and words” that disguise the real reality, so to speak. As the narrative progresses, it becomes ever more perceptibly unhinged, paying homage to Céline and Dostoevsky as Vytautas encounters odd, dangerous people in the street who are beginning to figure things out for themselves, including one threatening character who “smells like a holy man who has murdered his own God.”

Think of it as The Matrix behind the Iron Curtain—unsettling and profoundly interesting.

Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-934824-05-4

Page Count: 486

Publisher: Open Letter

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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...

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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

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HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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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.