Darkly charming.
After two starkly different novels (The Hiding Place, 2001 and Remember Me, 2004), Azzopardi moves in yet a third direction: a romance, springing to life on the English coast, between two damaged souls struggling to get beyond tragic losses suffered in their childhoods.
For years, Lewis, now in his mid-30s, has been driving himself mad with survivor’s guilt over the death of his twin brother, Wayne, in a car accident when they were 15. He comes to the Norfolk coast looking for Carl, Wayne’s friend, who was driving the car but has never shown remorse. Lewis rents a room from Rita, a lively septuagenarian whose daughter Anna happens to be visiting to help Rita after a fall. Anna and Lewis immediately recognize and are drawn to each other’s despair, although their anguish differs in degree. Anna, lonely and neurotically withdrawn, suffering from partial hearing loss that dates back to her father’s death when she was seven, disapproves of Rita’s boisterous lifestyle and boyfriend, a retired actor/ventriloquist nicknamed Cabbage, but her scenes with her mother can be touchingly funny. Lewis has drawn closer to real insanity, with a scary tendency to black out and break things. Through coincidences that feel a bit too carefully staged, Lewis learns that Carl might be in nearby Winterton and takes off. Just as Lewis is dragging Carl into the ocean, possibly to drown him, Anna shows up. No one is hurt, but Rita tells Lewis he must go away until he gets his life on track. Meanwhile, Rita and Cabbage marry, much to the dismay of Anna. With help from Carl’s father, Lewis finally accepts the reality of his past and is ready to build a life with Anna, who has been facing down her own fears. Azzopardi keeps the lovers apart for too much of the novel. Their memories and even their interactions tend to be elliptical, but the novel’s odd logic nevertheless draws the reader in.
Darkly charming.Pub Date: March 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-1841-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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