Mankell (The Eye of the Leopard, 2008, etc.) provides a moving test of Welin’s belief that “people are close to each other...
The creator of police detective Kurt Wallander presents a tale of mortal reckoning in which all the deaths are natural but none the less powerful.
After he lost his surgical license over a disastrous mistake, Fredrik Welin retired to a remote archipelago where he had only half a dozen neighbors and the three miles to the Swedish mainland were iced over when winter came. With his only company a dog, a cat and the anthill that’s been taking shape for years in his living room, he ekes out a frozen life without letters, without regrets over his two failed marriages and, evidently, without much thought for anything except the cold. He scorns the discount coupons the postal carrier brings him: “Life is basically about something more important. I don’t know what exactly.” All that changes with the unexpected, unwanted arrival of Harriet Hörnfeldt, the lover Welin abandoned a generation ago when he left for an American post without a word of farewell. The fatally ill Harriet’s demand that Welin take her to see the forest pool he’d described to her so long ago is only the first stage in a journey that will break up the ice that’s armored Welin’s heart for so long. His newfound, urgent and troubled return to the world of others will involve a homeless spaniel on the mainland; an Italian craftsman who takes four months to make a pair of shoes; a fraught meeting with Harriet’s daughter; a reunion with the patient whose life he ruined; and an Iranian refugee girl who’s nothing but trouble, even to herself. The tone throughout is elegiac—someone always seems to be dying, even as Welin is surging back to life—yet quietly hopeful, with each step forward a hard-won victory over winter’s freeze.
Mankell (The Eye of the Leopard, 2008, etc.) provides a moving test of Welin’s belief that “people are close to each other so that they can be parted.”Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-436-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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