In this lyrical account of illness and nearly dying, moments of beauty are interspersed between longer sections of cryptic...
A coma inspired this renowned writer to reflect on his life, his work, and what it means to die.
Kaniuk, an Israeli artist and writer who died in 2013, was 74 when he developed a cancerous growth in his colon. The growth was removed, but Kaniuk spent four months in a coma and several months after that in a dreamlike trance, hovering between the two more definite states that have given his new book its title. In this “autobiographical novel” originally published in Israel in 2007, Kaniuk (1948, 2012, etc.) describes that experience: the confusion of the surgical theater, the recurring infections and other complications, the long-drawn-out recovery. More than all that, though, he focuses on the hallucinatory months when he drifted in and out of consciousness. As he says, “I felt like the monk who didn’t know if he dreamed he was a donkey or if he was the donkey who dreamed he was a monk.” He shifts from descriptions of memories to dreams to waking life, sometimes within the same sentence. By doing so, he undermines the standard assumption that only lucid consciousness can be comprehensible. “And why is it really so important to know if all that was true or not?” he writes. “If I think I saw, I saw.” In this way he links the experience to a lifetime’s habit of invention. “I would make up reality and I still do,” he writes. If his looping sentences sometimes make his precise meaning difficult to determine, it’s a forgivable quirk. Still, the book’s shapelessness becomes tiresome after a while. One longs for a moment of clean, clear lucidity. Instead, the narrative ravels outward.
In this lyrical account of illness and nearly dying, moments of beauty are interspersed between longer sections of cryptic obscurity.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 9781632060921
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...
A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.
Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.
A daunting experimental novel by Hungarian writer Krasznahorkai (The World Goes On, 2017, etc.), who blends his trademark interests in philosophy and apocalypse.
The baron of the title is an “unspeakably elegant” member of the erstwhile Habsburg nobility of Hungary who has been living in exile in Argentina until, finally, his debts at the casino catch up to him. Nostalgic and elderly, though still given to dandyish ways, he returns to the countryside haunts of his youth, hoping along the way to rekindle a long-ago romance with a woman whom, late in the story, a factotum likens to Cervantes’ Dulcinea del Toboso. The baron is no Quixote, though the Hungary to which he returns has no end of windmills against which to tilt—including oil derricks everywhere. Krasznahorkai fills his pages with knowing nods to European nationalism: An Austrian train conductor, for instance, sniffs that “even they”—the Hungarians on the other side of the border—“had been trying to conform to European standards” when it came to safety, schedule, and other things train conductors are supposed to worry about. The baron cuts a memorable figure, but the real star of Krasznahorkai’s story is a philosopher who has cut himself off from society and lives in hermitage in a forest park, concerned with problems of being and nonbeing: “Everything is a kind of philosophical boxing match that leads only to non-existence, and this is, in all likelihood, the greatest error of existence.” Even the erstwhile professor has his prejudices, grumbling along with the townsfolk about the gypsies who have dared pitch their own camp nearby. Krasznahorkai tends to long, digressive passages that build on and allude to other pieces, and the word “non-existence" turns up often enough to suggest a theme. But no matter: In the end, the worlds the philosopher, the baron, and other characters inhabit are slated to disappear in a wall of flame, an apocalypse that, as Krasznahorkai assures, is not just physical and actual, but also existential.
A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2664-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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