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HEAD ABOVE WATER

Name: HEAD ABOVE WATER
Author: Stefano Bortolussi
ISBN: 0-87286-426-X

by Stefano Bortolussi & translated by Anne M. Appel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2003

Very deftly handled: Italian poet Bortolussi’s debut has a light touch that keeps Cardo from taking himself too...

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Middle-aged writer awkwardly attempts to make peace with his past—and grow up while he’s at it.

Riccardo (“Cardo”) Mariano has a knack for falling in love with women during shipwrecks. A novelist from Milan, Cardo met Solveig (“Sol”) in a coastal town in Norway when she accidentally sank his dinghy by ramming it with her father’s fishing boat. It wasn’t the best introduction imaginable, but it worked: Sol eventually became Cardo’s lover, moved to Italy with him, and became pregnant with his child. Before the baby was born, however, Cardo made the mistake of coming to the aid of Cate, a young woman whose kayak had run aground off a tiny island near his rowing club. As he struggled to extricate her craft, both Cate and Cardo fell overboard—and into each other’s arms. Guilt-ridden, Cardo later confessed his adultery to Sol, who promptly packed up and returned to Norway to have the baby on her own. Alone and out of sorts, Cardo began to look over the mess he had made of his life. The son of a Milanese businessman who abandoned the family after the death of Cardo’s younger brother Michele, Cardo had grown up in the 1970s and was a true son of his age: He was nihilistic, angry, and self-indulgent. Deeply involved in the various Marxist sects that dominated Italy in the post-Vietnam years, Cardo had never really had any strong political convictions and he dropped his involvements eventually as easily as he dropped most of his girlfriends. Now he began to see that his rootlessness had something to do with the death of Michele, and his attempts to sort out his feelings toward his dead brother serve to clarify his longings for Sol and their child. Before long, he makes another trip to Norway.

Very deftly handled: Italian poet Bortolussi’s debut has a light touch that keeps Cardo from taking himself too seriously—and thereby keeps all of this from veering into a swamp of sentimentality and self-absorption.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2003

ISBN: 0-87286-426-X

Page Count: 186

Publisher: City Lights

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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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.