A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.
Mexican author Nettel's (The Body Where I Was Born, 2015, etc.) third novel tells the intersecting stories of a man and a woman living, respectively, in New York City and Paris.
Misanthropic, Cuban-born Claudio holds the rest of humanity in contempt, adheres to a rigid routine, and keeps his New York apartment free of any visitors. "Every morning, as soon as the menacing noise of the world penetrates my window, the perennial questions arise: how to protect myself from contagion? How to avoid blending in, becoming corrupted?" Robots appeal to him, and at one point he yells, in a restaurant, "I want to be an infallible machine!" He barely tolerates his rich, long-suffering girlfriend, although "her eyes always look as if she is about to cry and this gives them a certain allure." Instead he dreams of an ideal woman with whom he will one day achieve happiness. Meanwhile, Cecilia, a Mexican graduate student in Paris, struggles with loneliness and the feeling of being useless. She spends her time watching the funerals that take place below her window in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Both Claudio and Cecilia are immigrants, and both see themselves, for different reasons, as outsiders removed from the other denizens of the cities they inhabit. The novel is told in first-person chapters that alternate between their points of view. As he endures emotional and physical pain, Claudio's arrogance becomes tempered, somewhat. "I, who had always had my life and my emotions under control, had now turned into a poor specimen of a human like those wretches the street teems with, sniveling on the escalators in the subway." Nettel writes with compassion for her flawed, unhappy characters and the isolation they feel within their adopted cities. As they navigate life's losses and disappointments, both gradually integrate more fully into humanity. "I myself formed part of the hordes of neurotics and schizophrenics who frighten the tourists," Cecilia realizes toward the end of the book. Though the characters' paths do cross, the book's greater concern is their individual journeys toward a provisional, imperfect belonging.
A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56689-525-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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