The once-disquieting, ever-dependably crude Self seems content for the moment to chum out hackneyed, no-brainer fiction, judging by his last story collection (Tough. Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, 1999, etc.) as well as this novella—the sophomoric study or a journalist seduced by the dark side of the media biz, copiously illustrated by Martin Rowson. Innocent Richard has come from an up-country newspaper to the glitz of a trendy London magazine. Too easily he finds his way to the Sealink Club, the watering hole for gossip columnists and other hacks like himself, and its inner circle, presided over by the all-powerful Bell, a superhack boasting a syndicated column, a TV show, and a radio talk program. Bell's all-flavors appetite for sex and all-night binges are legendary. Meanwhile, Richard has his eye on lovely Ursula, one of Bell's favorites, and does his best to make her notice him while keeping up the torrid pace of nightly debauchery that takes the group from the Sealink to opium dens and beyond. He finally persuades her to have lunch, and they establish a more normal relationship by day—even though she continues to ignore him by night. At the same time, the strain of his life in the fast lane takes a toll on Richard's job performance, and on his sanity, as he begins to see Bell's jaw-jutting visage everywhere, on billboards and on the faces of his fellow carousers. When at last Richard succeeds in arranging a night with Ursula alone, what starts as the fulfillment of his wildest dreams turns into a wit's-ending nightmare. Not much more than a piffle, although, to be fair, the story dies continue to develop themes handled masterfully in Self's earlier work.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-3647-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1999
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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