A small but rich little instant classic, as though Joseph Conrad had sent up a perfect new tale from the silence beyond the...
Manguel (News from a Foreign Country Came, 1990; the nonfiction A History of Reading, 1995; etc.) offers a tiny but deft and quietly moving story of Robert Louis Stevenson at his premature death.
Stevenson’s health brought him first to America and then to Samoa, but he was still to die at the age of 44, in 1894. Here, we follow him through the last weeks of his life, beginning one evening when he goes down to the beach to see the sunset and finds someone else there, a rather sullen fellow-Scot named Baker. Stevenson is pleased to hear an Edinburgh accent, but not to learn that Baker is on the island as a missionary, that he virulently disapproves of fiction, and that he disdains the natives for their heathenism and depravity—especially for their nudity, which Stevenson—and perhaps even his American wife—has come to accept and value for the simple beauty that it is. Baker, though, is the serpent in Eden. He disappears for certain periods and then turns up again, while Stevenson goes through spells of racking fever and cough, then periods of inexplicably hale respite. At a festival in the town, his eye is caught by an especially lovely young girl, one of a dancing group—and in his mind she remains, even as he suffers through another especially grim period time of illness. When this same girl is found murdered, her father suspects Stevenson—even his brimmed hat was found at the scene. Impossible. The reader knows—from page one—that Baker wears a hat “not unlike Stevenson’s own.” But we’ll never know the truth: Baker disappears and Stevenson dies, suddenly and pathetically. And we’ll never know what was in the story the author wrote, furiously and at the height of his fever—because he burned it immediately upon his wife’s saying, aghast after reading it, “This is poison.”
A small but rich little instant classic, as though Joseph Conrad had sent up a perfect new tale from the silence beyond the grave.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-588-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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