by Hans-Ulrich Treichel & translated by John E. Woods ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2004
Deceptively simple, nicely nourishing fiction of the old school.
An emotionally muddled art student’s unlucky sexual ventures as he stumbles upon the Sardinian woman of his dreams.
Women typically find Albert rather idiotic and pathetic, especially the Roman policewoman with whom he has an unfortunate chance encounter while pursuing his study of Caravaggio. “Preoccupied with disastrous urges,” but lacking the courage to fulfill them, poor Albert, weaned on the revolutionary books of Wilhelm Reich and Peter Kropotkin, lives on the verge of daily frustration and regret; suffering from a deep-seated skin condition, he prefers to scratch at paintings rather than analyze them. Back home in Berlin, he visits a Mafia-style Italian bar and falls for Elena, an impassive, somnolent Sardinian waitress whose uses for Albert aren’t clear. She operates as a shill for Italian gamblers, and her heart is apparently taken by an older married “Persian”; Albert is terribly jealous of the man but can’t compete with him. Eventually, Elena saves enough money to buy a house back on her homeland and take up a cosmetology business. Albert, imagining he can research Caravaggio while there, follows her. The result, as with everything in his experience, is not what he imagines. Or does he have happiness within his reach, only to throw it away like the sandwiches his mother always made him lovingly before a long train trip? In a few short, sharp strokes, German novelist Treichel (Lost, 1999) delineates Albert's miserable and permanent state of sub-being: When he and Elena make love, “it was once again as if she were allowing him to take part in a feast to which people like him weren’t usually invited.” Albert is a bumbling romantic hero who needs to be rescued, and Treichel mirrors his restless, befuddled state with dry, passionless prose beautifully rendered in a marvelous and very funny translation by Wood, who has done equally well in the past for Thomas Mann, Patrick Suskind, and Ingo Schulze.
Deceptively simple, nicely nourishing fiction of the old school.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42261-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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by Hans-Ulrich Treichel & translated by Carol Brown Janeway
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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