A novel of considerable interest, steeped in Old-World traditions and New-World realities.
Love—both thwarted and realized—is the main theme of this first novel set in the subculture of Indian Muslims.
Nasr seems to have it all—a successful career in New York City, an active social life and a doting family. According to his mother, however, he’s missing the major component of success—a fiancée—so she goes about rectifying this social inadequacy by arranging a marriage. While Nasr’s good friend Jameela cautions him that “ ‘[d]epth…can’t be assessed visually’” and that Indians are “ ‘susceptible to commodification…the valuation of people as property,’ ” Nasr reluctantly succumbs to his mother’s connubial enthusiasm. With ludicrously high—and sometimes overly critical—standards (candidates are too religious, not religious enough, too Old World, too New World, and so on), Nasr finds himself attracted, and eventually engaged, to the modest and self-effacing Farah, a woman in great contrast to the outspoken Jameela. The world of their engagement, like the larger social and political world, is then disrupted by the traumatic events of September 11. Knowing that Nasr works in New York, friends and family seek him out for his perspective on the destruction of the Twin Towers, though he explains he was in London at the time of the attack. Just at the point when Nasr consciously realizes his strong attraction to the spunky and iconoclastic Jameela, a relationship that’s been developing spontaneously over many years of family friendship, she discovers that her fiancé Javaid is brutally attacked merely for being a Muslim in a post-9/11 world. Javaid responds by deciding rather abruptly to move to Pakistan, which he envisions as a more welcoming environment, but this is obviously a move that would physically separate Nasr and Jameela and make the possibility of further romance difficult, perhaps impossible.
A novel of considerable interest, steeped in Old-World traditions and New-World realities.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52460-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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