by Yoel Hoffmann & translated by Peter Cole ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2004
Beautiful, humane, priceless.
A poetic little slip of a thing that holds the world, decades, entire lives, sorrows and beauties all as if in a pair of cupped hands.
The title is from Aramaic for “cat” and German for “butterfly,” a suggestion of the elusiveness of what Hoffmann (The Heart is Katmandu, 2001, etc.) tries to catch in his numbered chapters with their alphabetized paragraphs and subchapters—all very short, and all evoking in one way or another the experience of a boy growing up in Israel. His visions and memories of the world around him blend the boy’s (“the chain of my Raleigh bicycle slipped out of the gears, and I saw, through the thin metal rods called spokes, Rachel Sirotta among the myrtles”) and the grown man’s (“All sorts of women whose names were Hilda tossed in their sleep”), just as effortlessly as they move from loveliness (“Franz sends his hand out toward the west and almost by chance pulls down the sun”) to the horrible (“Ehud Kaplan . . . two years later wrapped himself up in cotton and burned”). The boy’s parents are here (“this woman Mathilda, the daughter of R. Avraham of Frankfurt, and . . . this slanting man Andreas, the son of Yitzhak . . .”), as are his grandfather (“Biblical air surrounded him in his bed with bronze bars . . . “), his schooling (“we fell from school to school and in each place the chairs became larger”), eccentricities (“The words ‘nimbus clouds’ disturb him. He does not agree with the word nimbus”), love (“When Monica took offer her dress, grasshoppers leapt in the grass”), and, always, the universal in the humble: “[He] turns the wheel of the Singer sewing machine and the wheel that he turns in turn turns another (which is connected to it by a leather strip) and these two wheels drive the great wheel within which move the stars.”
Beautiful, humane, priceless.Pub Date: May 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-8112-1567-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Share your opinion of this book
More by Yoel Hoffmann
BOOK REVIEW
by Yoel Hoffmann ; translated by Peter Cole
BOOK REVIEW
by Yoel Hoffmann & translated by Peter Cole
BOOK REVIEW
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mark Z. Danielewski
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.