A provocative, sometimes-baffling set of riffs on inanimate objects and death, in that order.
A reissue of the author’s 1985 novella, an elliptical meditation on possessions and their loss.
This work by French-born novelist Lewinter (Story of Love in Solitude, 1989, etc.) has a definite arc, following the declining health of the narrator’s parents. But it’d be off-base to say it has a plot: Lewinter is a prose poet, delivering long, sinuous, and complex sentences that switch back and forth in time and weave around the story. (This edition includes the original French text to compare to Careau’s translation.) So though he’s contemplating mom’s and dad’s mortality, Lewinter’s hero is doing so through the filter of objects: a coveted LP; a bespoke shawl; Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry; a set of vintage porcelain. Rather than suggesting that the narrator’s fixation on stuff is misguided, Lewinter delivers an appreciation of the spiritual power of things: the shawl, for instance, possesses a “serene luminosity” whose threads are “equal parts solid, liquid, ethereal”; a singer on a record “becomes an elaboration of the divine.” Compared to the blunter depictions of his father’s trips in and out of the hospital and ultimately to hospice, the narrator can seem shallow; a brief fling with a street drunk only bolsters the notion. But Lewinter’s narrator is more interested in aesthetics than in morals. He seeks “that which transfigures the void,” and because he feels that’s more likely to be found in a song that can’t die, his remove from his father has a certain poignancy. The wooliness of the narration doesn’t wholly sell the point, but Lewinter unquestionably brings a lot of gravitas to a brief, abstracted tale.
A provocative, sometimes-baffling set of riffs on inanimate objects and death, in that order.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2520-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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