The fourth and final installment in a ``Tetralogy of Elements'' (The Fountains of Neptune, etc.), in which novelist and illustrator Ducornet ``investigates the processes of fabulating, creating and remembering.'' Air is the element investigated in this last volume, which like its predecessors is filled with allusions, some obvious, some not; actual and imagined characters; and a story that's more a series of disparate set-pieces than a concentrated narrative. Here, Memory tells of her beautiful but mute elder sister, the eponymously named Etheria, ``a creature of light and air.'' The siblings' father is Angus Sphery, an eccentric scholar who believes that before the expulsion from Eden there existed a magical ``Primal Language spelled out phonetically by the planets'' and powerful enough ``to conjure the world of things.'' The family lives in Victorian Oxford and are befriended by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who is especially taken with Etheria's delicate beauty. When boorish tycoon Rudolph Tubbs falls in love with the adolescent Etheria, he presents her father with the chimera, a beautiful piece of jade—a gift that ensures the latter's consent to the marriage. The unhappy Etheria, however, soon leaves Tubbs, who then travels to Egypt with a mad architect and a circus performer who lives on air. Pyramids collapse, mummies turn into fertilizer, and Memory adds her own random insights, naturally about memory, which ``is like a jade cabinet...where the jade appears to be the same yet the mind is forever replacing it.'' An interesting thought, but not really relevant to the vanished Etheria, who, departing from her father's belief that language could unify all, has concluded the opposite. Rumored to be a magician, she's found ``the Word, surely a silent one,'' that can make everything disappear. Imaginative and beautifully crafted but crushed by recondite intellectual intentions. Too clever by half.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56478-021-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.
Based on an actual incident in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Ramzipoor’s debut is a tragicomic account of fake news for a cause.
Structured like a heist movie, the novel follows several members of a conspiracy in Enghien, Belgium, who have a daring plan. The conspirators do not intend to survive this caper, only to bring some humor—and encouragement for resisters—into the grim existence of Belgians under Nazi rule. To this end, the plotters—among them Marc Aubrion, a journalist and comic; David Spiegelman, an expert forger; Lada Tarcovich, a smuggler and sex worker; and Gamin, a girl masquerading as a male street urchin—intend to...publish a newspaper. And only one issue of a newspaper, to be substituted on one night for the regular evening paper, Le Soir, which has become a mouthpiece for Nazi disinformation. Le Faux Soir, as the changeling paper is appropriately dubbed, will feature satire, doctored photographs making fun of Hitler, and wry requests for a long-overdue Allied invasion. (Target press date: Nov. 11, 1943.) To avoid immediate capture, the Faux Soir staff must act as double agents, convincing (or maybe not) the local Nazi commandant, August Wolff, that they are actually putting out an anti-Allies “propaganda bomb.” The challenge of fleshing out and differentiating so many colorful characters, combined with the sheer logistics of acquiring paper, ink, money, facilities, etc. under the Gestapo’s nose, makes for an excruciatingly slow exposé of how this sausage will be made. The banter here, reminiscent of the better Ocean’s Eleven sequels, keeps the mechanism well oiled, but it is still creaky. A few scenes amply illustrate the brutality of the Occupation, and sexual orientation works its way in: Lada is a lesbian and David, in addition to being a Jew, is gay—August Wolff’s closeted desire may be the only reason David has, so far, escaped the camps. The genuine pathos at the end of this overdetermined rainbow may be worth the wait.
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0815-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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