Heartfelt, but murky and unpersuasive.
Japin (In Lucia’s Eyes, 2005, etc.) follows up two excellent novels rooted in historical fact with a disappointing effort based on his personal history.
An Afterword acknowledges that the author and a beloved female friend are the models for Maxim and Gala, Dutch actors who cross the path of legendary Italian film director Snaporaz (read: Federico Fellini) in Rome during the 1980s. The opening chapters introduce us to Gala in 1966, painting a compelling portrait of a seven-year-old who provokes her father with reckless behavior. Maxim enters in 1976, when he and Gala are cast in a play at Amsterdam’s student theater. This quiet, cautious young man is drawn to Gala, who galvanizes him with her boldness, and their charged relationship is sealed when he nurses her through an epileptic fit. Thereafter, Maxim is constantly reminding Gala to take her medication and fussing over her more like a father than a lover. Indeed, we learn after they arrive in Rome that they don’t have sex, for cloudily explained reasons. Engaging monologues by Snaporaz are interpolated throughout, but the couple doesn’t meet him until nearly halfway through the novel, after some La Dolce Vita–esque interactions with a down-at-the-heels aristocrat who pimps Gala out to a Sicilian doctor and an over-the-hill opera director (read: Franco Zeffirelli) who fancies Maxim. Japin vividly evokes the mingled desperation and exhilaration of impoverished actors on the loose in the magnificently corrupt Eternal City. But it all falls apart once Gala becomes Snaporaz’s mistress. Despite some thematic mumbo-jumbo about “the more limitations you impose, the more possibilities you create,” her self-imposed isolation and inaction—she won’t even leave her apartment for fear of missing his phone calls—never makes sense, and Maxim’s passive-aggressive response is equally baffling. You know a novel is in trouble when you find yourself thinking that the characters’ problems could have been solved by call waiting or a cell phone.
Heartfelt, but murky and unpersuasive.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4062-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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