A lively tale of magical realism that occasionally stumbles in attempting to wow you, offering a rather superficial analysis...
Birth, death, three husbands, eight children, and a few grumpy ghosts are just some of the details in the grand life of Rosa, courtesy of Israeli novelist Horn (Four Mothers, 1999, etc.).
Rosa is born during Israel’s War of Independence, and her fantastical life begins shortly after the murder of her father. Raised by the thin, dour Angela, who makes a tidy living by reading her neighbors’ coffee grounds, young Rosa first finds fame as the most beautiful baby born to the new state. Salons rename a hairstyle for her perfect blond ringlets; strangers on the street stare at her loveliness. She lives a charmed life, though not untouched by the tragedies of the greater world: her best childhood friend is a Holocaust survivor (she learns arithmetic from the numbers tattooed on his arm), and she’s haunted by the little Arab girl whose usurped house she now lives in. At 14, she marries her uncle Joseph, and, despite the unusual union, they share a happy life and raise seven children. When their eighth is born, Rosa is in her 50s, and she makes headlines again, but her daughter Angel is hunchbacked and will never grow in size past the age of two, fulfilling Rosa’s secret wish that her children stay small forever. In accordance with a childhood game that predicted Rosa would have four husbands, Joseph falls into a decline and soon dies after seeing the deformed Angel. Husband number two, a childhood sweetheart, dies in a bizarre accident involving Rosa’s again-newsworthy weight gain; husband three is an artist seeking to paint the country’s most famous woman. Rosa’s zest for life, food, and sex ease the anguish of her husbands’ deaths (their ghosts are in bed with her at night), but it’s Angel, perhaps a demon of bad luck, who challenges Rosa’s will to live.
A lively tale of magical realism that occasionally stumbles in attempting to wow you, offering a rather superficial analysis of its hero. Still, an entertaining folly.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26590-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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