A strikingly imagined first novel (after stories: On the Golden Porch, 1989; Sleepwalker in a Fog, 1992) skillfully creates a frightening and perversely funny postnuclear world.
The setting is what once was Moscow, two hundred years after “the Blast” that leveled the metropolis, leaving a frozen wasteland clogged with trash and populated by a mixture of “normal” human beings and grotesque mutants. Moscow is now called Fyodor-Kuzmichsk, in honor of its seldom-seen dictator Kablukov, a paternalistic egotist who is reputed to have invented every useful object now known to man and to be the author of the classic literary works he blithely plagiarizes. A ravenous mythical beast, the slynx, further impairs the wretched lives of oppressed workers (“Golubchiks”), prowling the ruined city’s dark outskirts. And Benedikt, a Golubchik employed as one of the numerous scribes recording the dictator’s ostensible works, naively incarnates both his people’s passive servitude, and—once he’s introduced to forbidden books by “Oldeners” who deny Fyodor Kuzmich’s virtual divinity—their urge toward enlightenment and freedom. Sustained by his love for his fiancée Olenka, and encouraged by his putative father-in-law Kudeyar Kudeyarich, Benedikt aspires to further knowledge (“He dreamt he knew how to fly”), loses his own mutant status (surrendering his vestigial tail), and finds himself crucially involved in a “revolution” that ends Fyodor Kuzmich’s abuses of power even as it recycles them in different forms. The slynx is thus less mythic than symbolic: it’s the beast in man. Tolstaya enriches this mordant farce with a wealth of weird supporting detail reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’s futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange. An ending note informs us that The Slynx was written between 1986 and 2000, and it’s easy to see why.
A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy, and an impressive step forward for the gifted Tolstaya.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-12497-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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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