A surprising, provocative debut that holds the weight of myth.
Two young girls raised in a Deaf family must find their way after their sheltered, codependent world is shattered.
Lili and Dori Ackerman are Deaf. All their lives, they have lived in an isolation largely imposed on the family by their father; they have no interaction with hearing people, as their parents are also Deaf and choose to teach the girls at home. All the elements of their existence are controlled, planned for, regulated—not unlike the controlled climate of an aquarium, complete with visitors pressing their faces against the glass to gaze upon the exotic dwellers within. When the borders of their fortress are breached and new elements introduced into their world, the consequences have a ripple effect the Ackermans could not have foreseen. The narrative switches back and forth between perspectives as we observe Lili and Dori walking their separate paths, representing two different possibilities—counterlives, as Philip Roth would have it. Israeli poet and editor Shehori’s debut novel has the resonance of a folktale, rendered in evocative prose (for which we must also credit translator Hasak-Lowy) that lends an otherworldly quality to the story, mirroring the rarified existence of the Ackerman sisters. But ultimately, this comes at the expense of an engaging narrative, as we are kept at arm’s length from the protagonists; despite the extended glimpses into their interiority, they are more like characters in a fable than they are fully drawn, idiosyncratic people. Nevertheless, Shehori has brought into being a memorable fictional world that asks us to rethink our assumptions about family versus community, nature versus nurture, and how we relate to—and communicate with—one another.
A surprising, provocative debut that holds the weight of myth.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-3741-0592-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.
Two sisters sail around the world.
It’s 1911, and after her much older half sister marries a ship’s captain, teenage Kay joins them onboard the Morning Light for a trip around the world. Their strict father has recently died, and as they travel, the sisters find themselves still haunted by his legacy: He’d run a school for Native American children in remote Canada, where scores of students apparently died from tuberculosis. Now Kay suffers from nightmares so severe she wakes up screaming. But as the trip continues, both Kay and her sister, Thea, begin to have a look around them. Kay begins studying ancient Greek with a goofy English pastor who’s joined them. Things change when Thea, who longs for a child, adopts a young boy from a poor Micronesian island. Kay is troubled by the adoption, though she can’t immediately articulate why. Endicott depicts her characters with great delicacy and sympathy. Kay, especially, is a wonder to behold: She’s barely a teenager when the novel begins, and to witness her first encounters with the world, as she quietly unravels her own feelings and beliefs about what she sees, is simply marvelous. The novel’s second half shifts in time and mood in a way that feels both surprising and exactly right. There is so much in this book to linger over, from Kay and Thea’s relationship with each other to the strength and autonomy of Kay’s mind to Endicott’s lyrical descriptions of the sea and the ship. It’s a novel to return to again and again.
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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