Soulful on a subliminal seafloor.
Magic-drawing-pad paragraphs from psychotropic child genius Robbins (Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, 2000, etc.).
What can a poor reviewer do when attempting to skimble-skamble through that celebrated cerebellum in search of storyline when each page fades immediately? Might Robbins not review himself and quote heavily from a hairy bonfire of half-naked similes, the kind that leave a girl mellowed out, disrobed, lustful, and movie-going on the living-room rug? And yet, something serious, a playfulness and sense of fun, deep-surging in the lingual circuits, rises from the verbal infinitudes whispering from Robbins’s midbrain, a heroic antitoxin to the electronic wasteland of sitcoms and feel-good flicks. Using his outsized scrotum as a parachute, Tanuki, a potbellied, nearly tailless East Asian wild dog that walks on its hind legs, falls to earth from the Other World. After much success with country girls, Tanuki fails to seduce cosmopolite femmes and so spends a winter shape-shifting into human form. Now incognito, thieving Tanuki enters Kyoto—and so begin Candide-like adventures in counter-Zen philosophy: Tanuki’s philosophical duels with Kitsune the fox, his marriage to Miho, and his fathering of daughter Kazu. Centuries later, Tanuki’s descendants turn up in Seattle. Then, too, we meet American MIAs who prefer Asia to the States; Miss Ginger Sweetie, a Bangkok whore studying comparative literature; the guitar-playing Dickie Goldwire; godawful Elvis impersonator Elvisuit, who sometimes sings at Patpong’s Cherry Bomb Club; and Madame Ko and her tumbling tanukis in the Southeast Asian circus. All leads to an autumnal farewell: “All across the clearing, the dying grass and sun were practically the same shade of yellow. Last-minute shoppers crowded the pollen parlors, and every other flower-head drooped from bee-weight . . . Already rubbed red by nights of foreplay, boughs, each leaf alert, awaited the transformative ejaculation of frost.”
Soulful on a subliminal seafloor.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80332-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Brawny and urgent, it’s unmistakably Amis, though without the gimmickry of Time's Arrow (1991).
Can love survive against that most hellish of backdrops, the Nazi concentration camp? It's a question that Amis (Lionel Asbo, 2012, etc.) probes in his latest novel, an indelible and unsentimental exploration of the depths of the human soul.
Opening in August 1942, the book's events are narrated from the viewpoints of three distinct characters. Arctic-eyed Golo Thomsen, a German officer, looks every bit the Aryan ideal, ensuring him a lusty welcome in beds across the Reich. He also happens to be the nephew of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, though his personal views regarding the Fuhrer's campaign are a good deal more opaque. Paul Doll is the queasily named camp commandant, a doltish yet wily drunkard whose cool wife, Hannah, has caught Thomsen's eye. As for Szmul, back in Poland he was a tender husband and father. In the camp, he is a member of the Sonderkommando, forced to herd fellow inmates into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies. It’s Szmul who recalls a fable about a king who commissioned a magic mirror that reflected one’s soul. Nobody in the kingdom could look at it for 60 seconds without turning away. The camp, he says, is that mirror. Only you can’t turn away. As Thomsen contrives to woo Hannah, word reaches the Officers’ Club that German forces are surrounded at Stalingrad. Doll becomes increasingly paranoid and Szmul, a bearer of perilous Nazi secrets, strives to find a way to reclaim his life. With malice rampant, absurdity lurks in the shadows, drawn out by twisted details like bureaucratic euphemisms or the fact that Jews are made to pay for their own tickets aboard the trains bringing them to the camp.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35349-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Two-thirds of a terrific book.
An inventive reimagining of a grisly chapter in American history.
Westward migration, murder, sensation: the story of the Donner Party has all this, which makes it, in its way, a quintessentially American story. This imaginative retelling of the group’s journey communicates the fatal naiveté of people who thought they could carry their comfortable lives across deserts and mountains, as well as the particular horrors that befell the families who followed George Donner. The wide-open spaces of the West feel closed in here, as there is nothing but danger and desolation beyond the tents and fires of the wagon train. By focusing on a few figures, Katsu creates a riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances as bad fortune befalls these travelers. Not surprisingly, each of her central characters has a past that he or she is trying to escape, and these pasts are intertwined. This serves to create a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the coming tragedy isn’t just an accident of bad weather and poor leadership, but a matter of fate. And this is all before the ravaged bodies start appearing….As they stumble across corpses that appear to be sacrifices, as they confront their own gruesome losses, the settlers don’t know if the evil stalking them comes from within or without. Is the need for human flesh a communicable disease or a hereditary curse? Or is the wilderness filled with monsters? The tensions Katsu creates are thrilling. The final act of the novel, though, fails to deliver. There’s a surfeit of back story, and confessions and revelations that should be shocking fall flat, largely because they’re obvious. And, most unfortunately, the cannibalism—the thing that makes the Donner Party the Donner Party in history and popular consciousness—becomes boring. The conflicting theories the novel puts forward collapse into confusion, and it turns out that the idea of people desperate enough to break a nearly universal taboo is more interesting than any of the exotic explanations Katsu conjures.
Two-thirds of a terrific book.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1251-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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