A wry, mind-bending delight: Borges and Calvino would have welcomed Vila-Matas as a kinsman.
A blocked writer sings the praises of literary failure, in this first English translation from a prizewinning Spanish author.
The unnamed narrator is a hunchbacked, lonely clerical worker and hopeful author, unable to follow up his obscure first book, who takes extended sick leave and vacation time to record instances of self-imposed literary “silence” in “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text.” Said footnotes cite the stalled careers of J.D. Salinger, Herman Melville (who wrote virtually nothing during his last three decades), Henry Roth (who rediscovered his authorial voice only in old age), Socrates (who committed none of his thoughts to paper), and comparatively lesser-known idlers like Swiss miniaturist Robert Walser and Spain’s Felipe Alfau, among others. The narrator analyzes excuses for not writing: illness, alcohol or drug addiction, madness, lack of inspiration, or, simply, rechanneling one’s energies (e.g., Diderot’s contemporary Joseph Joubert, who distributed all his promising premises throughout a vast diary). He also records such parallel cases as those of artist Marcel Duchamp, who forswore painting because of his passion for chess; Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronym” (i.e., fictional alter ego) the Baron of Teive, whose brilliance was never permitted to flower; and a (doubtless fictional) “cyclist who suffered from mood swings and would sometimes forget to finish a race.” Other explicitly fictional do-nothings include the narrator’s writer friend Maria, hamstrung by her fixation on the anti-narrative techniques of French “New Wave” novelists, and “Paranoid Pérez,” who (in a very funny sequence) claims that Nobel laureate José Saramago has stolen all his best ideas. On and on it goes, quite madly and irresistibly. The irony of course is that in dwelling with such intricate metafictional insistence on the impossibility of writing his second book, the narrator has in fact written it.
A wry, mind-bending delight: Borges and Calvino would have welcomed Vila-Matas as a kinsman.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-8112-1591-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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