The strange, unpredictable arc of a born narcissist who turns out to have a soul after all.
The rake from Mason’s preternaturally witty History of a Pleasure Seeker (2012) comes to an untimely end.
There’s something of a bait-and-switch inherent in this unlikely sequel in which the author seems determined to punish his primary character for the very traits that captured readers’ imaginations in the first place. Our hero once more is Piet Barol, a Dutch con artist posing as a French aristocrat in Cape Town on the eve of World War I. But he’s a much different man than we remember, coasting on borrowed funds and running his furniture business into the ground. He delights in his son, Arthur, but his shrill wife, an oversexed American named Stacey, is determined that Piet become a success. Though Piet is still a charismatic character, he’s developed a palpable middle age melancholy. After taking a large order from a local mining magnate, Piet needs a new source for wood. He finds it near the coastal village of Gwadana in an untouched mahogany forest worshiped by the Xhosa people, and with the help of two Xhosa servants, he embarks on a complex scheme to convince the Xhosa that the forest is inhabited by a murderous creature. In the midst of this misadventure, Piet Barol ceases being the enigmatic raconteur and transforms into merely an instrument by which Mason can reflect on African culture, the sins of colonialism, and the roots of apartheid. By the time Stacey arrives in the company of a racist foreman, Frank Albemarle, Piet has very nearly gone native, and it’s not long before karma catches up with him. Mason continues to earn his reputation with exquisitely crafted sentences and a dizzying knack for storytelling. But this is an unexpected, winding diversion that may catch readers by surprise.
The strange, unpredictable arc of a born narcissist who turns out to have a soul after all.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35288-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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