Great stuff, but it won’t make you feel good.
The late, brilliant Austrian writer’s first (1963) novel, previously untranslated, is a characteristic excoriation of all things great and small and the tragicomedy of existence.
Bernhard (1931–89) is an anti-Whitman who celebrates and sings the omnipresence of non-meaning, an anti-Blake who sees the universe in every grain of sand that irritates the eye and obscures the vision. The perfect setting for his maiden voyage into nihilism is Weng, a remote mining village—to which his unnamed narrator, a young medical student, is sent by his surgical professor and mentor: his mission—to observe, study and report on the latter’s brother (Strauch), a reclusive painter who is lodging in a rundown inn (where the narrator also boards) operated by a venal Falstaffian landlady whose violent husband languishes in prison. The narrator forms conversational relationships with assorted villagers (a surly policeman who was once a medical student, an engineer who laments the despoiling of nature by man-made constructions, the “knacker,” or tradesman, who fulfills the landlady’s lust and supplies materials for her appalling cuisine). But he’s really a sounding board for fulmination incessantly voiced by the misanthropic, despair-ridden Strauch, who holds forth at inordinate (and often hilarious) length on such topics as his miserable childhood, inadequate education, unhappy personal relationships, artistic failures and intuitive conviction that the world is doomed, in every imaginable way (e.g., “The most beautiful flowers are cut first”). Images of darkness and cold predominate in a region where miners are perpetually endangered, relentless frost impedes construction of a vitally necessary bridge and death and dissolution seize every opportunity to work their will (“Tomorrow is the funeral of the woodcutter who was run over by his own sleigh”). The book is indeed redundant, but the unity and coherence of its mordant vision are, as in all Bernhard’s later, superior works, perversely exhilarating.
Great stuff, but it won’t make you feel good.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4066-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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