The connections Lazar makes here are complex and artful, though at times bewildering even to discerning readers.
A complex tale involving Meyer Lansky, Las Vegas, an investigative reporter and the murder of an Israeli poet.
Lazar (Evening’s Empire, 2009, etc.) brings all these elements—and more—together as he jumps across decades and intercalates different narrators. At the center of the novel is Meyer Lansky, not the brash young gangster but, rather, the elderly, frail and even pathetic figure who petitions the government of Israel, where he wants to live out his last years, for citizenship. His request is denied, and he’s returned to the United States. We learn about Lansky’s relationship with his mistress Gila Konig, a cocktail waitress, and Lazar also gives us tantalizing glimpses into Lansky’s connections to Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. Back in New York, Gila becomes a Hebrew teacher but quits after an ugly confrontation regarding her experience in Bergen-Belsen. One of her students, Hannah Groff, eventually grows up, becomes a reporter and goes to Israel to investigate the death of writer David Bellen, who was both a poet and a belletrist. One of his long essays, like the novel entitled Pity the Poor Immigrant, is an extended meditation on several books involving Las Vegas and Jewish gangsters, specifically Meyer Lansky. (It’s a sign of Lazar’s verisimilitude that the books his fictitious poet reviews are in fact real books.) Hannah both develops and pursues an interest in Gila, who, it turns out, had a relationship with Hannah’s father.
The connections Lazar makes here are complex and artful, though at times bewildering even to discerning readers.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-25403-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
PROFILES
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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