Ri’s incessant networking question—is someone “knowable?”—applies mainly to herself in this absorbing but decidedly...
An enigmatic real-life Sino-Japanese film star, Ri Koran, remains a cipher after three self-absorbed narrators fail to illuminate her, in the latest from Buruma (Journalism/Bard Coll.; Murder in Amsterdam, 2006, etc.).
Buruma has written nonfiction works on China, Japan and jihadism. He displays his erudition on all three topics in this novel. The narrators of the book’s three sections—a homosexual American censor, Vanoven, stationed in postwar Tokyo; Sato Daisuke, a talent agent/private eye in Japanese-occupied Manchuria; and a screenwriter (also surnamed Sato) who joins the ’70s-era Japanese Red Army movement—track Ri’s serpentine CV through the thick, sometimes opaque, scrim of their own preoccupations. Born Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Manchuria to a Japanese couple, Ri was educated in Chinese private schools. Gifted with soulful eyes and a soprano to match, Ri passes as Chinese and stars in the film China Nights. The movie—and Ri—come to symbolize Japan’s efforts, while invading China and installing a puppet empire in Manchuria, to couch its imperialistic agenda in pan-Asian peace platitudes. After World War II, Ri renounces her Chinese persona and seeks fame as a Hollywood and Tokyo movie actress. When her marriage and career in Tokyo fall apart, due to a U.S.-sanctioned regime change reinstating war criminals, Ri reinvents herself as a TV journalist and host of a housewife-targeted news show. She hires young Sato, former crewmember on pornographic pinku films turned TV news-writer turned Japanese student militant and Palestinian sympathizer. Old Sato’s section, mostly set in Manchuria, detracts most from the novel’s focus. His story lingers on his obsession with another Yoshiko, a cross-dressing siren whose treachery nets him a prison stay and torture. Vanoven, though an engaging confidant, fails to vivify Ri as a protagonist. Young Sato morphs into a Palestinian martyr/hero and Ri gets lost in the ensuing Kamikaze parallels.
Ri’s incessant networking question—is someone “knowable?”—applies mainly to herself in this absorbing but decidedly un-novelistic portrayal of cross-cultural adventurers.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-194-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
