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BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY

Name: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY
Author: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9358-5

by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2013

An interesting experiment in nontraditional fiction but a somewhat disappointing follow-up from a talented new voice.

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It turns out that war is more boring than hell in these tangentially connected short stories from the author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (2009).

The author’s collection feels very much like a product of work created for the audiences of the New Yorker and Granta, publications to which he contributes. While the stories aren’t strictly linked to each other, it’s obvious that they’ve been set in the same world, although Sayrafiezadeh goes to great pains to strip his milieu down to a pure, abstract canvas. The stories are set in a world at war, or wars, somewhere on a peninsula. It’s not always clear which country each story is set in, either, although the United States is clearly identified as one of the combatants. The centerpiece is “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy,” during which an American serviceman named Luke finally finds a way to break up the tedium of war. But the story is a rare jab to readers who may be put off by the obscurity of the rest of the collection. Many of the stories, such as “Cartography” and “Appetite,” deal with characters who are not living up to their potentials, toiling in dead-end jobs. Others, like “Enchantment” and “Operators,” examine the aftermath of war with a perplexing simplicity for a writer who is clearly capable of deeper insights. The soldier in “Enchantment” is particularly disappointing, as he waits for a class of prep school students to recognize that “We won” is the right answer to his question: “I’d hold nothing back and they’d be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means we had available. That was how we won the war.”

An interesting experiment in nontraditional fiction but a somewhat disappointing follow-up from a talented new voice.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9358-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Dial Press

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
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.