Next book

ISOLDE

A chilling pleasure.

First published in 1929 but only just translated into English, Russian novelist/poet/playwrite/memoirist Odoevtseva’s arresting tale of teenage Russian expats living in France is as dark as it is dreamy.

The book was not an instant hit when it was first published in Paris, where Odoevtseva, like her characters, had fled to escape the Russian Revolution. Among the critical charges against it: It abused “sexual spice”; it was “dry”; it stereotyped the English; it had lesbian overtones. It was, co-translator Karetnyk writes in his engaging introduction, “all much too modern, much too European, much too explicit, much too close to the bone.” Indeed, it is all of those things, which is exactly what makes it great; the setting may be dated, but the writing, as translated by Karetnyk and Steinberg, is arrestingly contemporary. When we first meet 14-year-old Liza, the heart and center of the novel, it is on the beach in Biarritz, and we see her through the eyes of a wealthy British boy named Cromwell, who falls in love with her immediately and renames her Isolde, to his Tristan. Men fall in love with Liza—it’s just what they do—though except for declaring their devotion, they rarely engage with who she is. Cromwell, the most earnest of the bunch, is a pleasant distraction for both her and her plotting older brother, Nikolai, both of whom bask in his affections and his cash. When the family returns to Paris in the fall, Liza reunites with her boyfriend, Andrei—Cromwell, after all, was just a sweet diversion—but finds herself increasingly uneasy, on the cusp of adulthood, longing still for the half-imaginary Moscow of her youth. When Nikolai and Andrei hatch a plot, using naïve Liza as a pawn, the doom that has been hovering over the novel comes to violent fruition, although the real action all takes place offstage. The novel might have been a moralistic tale about an abandoned generation; instead, because of Liza, it is captivating: Underneath her shallow mania is real complexity, and while Odoevtseva’s portrait of adolescence is disturbing, it is also very funny, a ray of light cutting through the misery of an otherwise dark world.

A chilling pleasure.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-78227-477-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:
Next book

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Categories:
Next book

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

Categories:
Close Quickview