An enchanting slice of pungent prose: indulgent, luxuriant and effectively titillating.
Lush, erotic, graphically depicted interpersonal relations between an obsessive, passionate couple.
Though the man and woman depicted in Stevenson’s provocative allegory remain unnamed throughout the story, the reader becomes intimately familiar with them by way of delicately woven, finely wrought passages. Desirous and flooded with endless longing, the woman, mysterious and serpentine in her movements, draws a cheerless, angry male to her with ease. Her warmth and passion releases him from a lifetime “spent in exile.” As teenagers, they made love in horse stables–now they walk on beaches, nap under trees during autumn afternoons or enjoy each other in a pier-house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, him caressing her as if she were “stones set in a warm wall touched lovingly by water and time.” The many segments detailing their coupling flow with poetic language that is sexually explicit yet bolstered by a fiery, brazen love that courses through both characters, but that only one of them openly acknowledges. Stevenson leaves little to the imagination when describing genitalia, or the push and pull of coital interplay, or the male’s “gymnastic energy” for a woman who uses his convulsive surges of emotion to render him helplessly mad, incapable of recognizing the outside world flourishing around him. In the concluding paragraphs, Stevenson changes the tone of the book from sexy to poignant, suggesting that much of the text could be the work of the man’s vivid imagination. In plumbing the depths of his unnamed characters’ deepest desires, Stevenson has created a love story that leaves the emotional details up to the reader. With a barely discernable storyline, the book forms a diminutive work of art in poem form: Stimulating free verse comprised of fertile words and metaphors on the thickness and possessiveness of love.
An enchanting slice of pungent prose: indulgent, luxuriant and effectively titillating.Pub Date: June 10, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-419-608308
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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