Although there are sparks of genuine wit in “The Happiness Game,” mostly at the expense of the parents and some of them...
First English-language translation for a popular Israeli columnist and journalist.
It’s depressing to discover that all the tedious mannerisms of “hip” contemporary American fiction have made their way across the ocean, but that’s the revelation offered here. This collection of three novellas reads like a compendium of literary brat-pack clichés: the oh-so-clever juxtaposition of a dog’s life and the crash-and-burn relationship of its master and mistress in the title story, the cute but aimless parallel of a 30-something’s affair and her 70-year-old parents’ sudden and seemingly unmotivated divorce in “The Happiness Game,” and the rapid shifting points-of-view in “Matti,” which Hedaya uses to tell the story of a man’s love for an adolescent girl, recalled by his wife, the girl, and his doctor as he lies dying of a brain tumor. All three tales suggest the impossibility of happiness in the chill of modern urban life, the disconnectedness and atomization that lead to repeated failed relationships, the jockeying for mastery that is a poor substitute for real feeling. The problem is that the writing is as devoid of such feeling as the people it depicts. Each of the stories is predicated on the methodical recounting of the details of daily life, and there is plenty of such detail, but no texture. Hedaya’s willfully lifeless prose reads like catalogue copy for a hardware store rather than literary fiction. The fault clearly lies with the writing and not the translation, which is expert in its rendering of the book’s cold, detached tone.
Although there are sparks of genuine wit in “The Happiness Game,” mostly at the expense of the parents and some of them randomly cruel, there isn’t much else that’s happening here.Pub Date: June 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-5998-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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