Edgy prose that elegantly distills a disturbing take on love.
From the author of Monsieur (1991), etc., a moody, often claustrophobic, and viscerally intense evocation of the end of an affair that’s begun in France and ends in Japan.
The urban setting—Tokyo—of this brief but concentrated chronicle of the death of love enriches what could be a conventional story. Toussaint’s descriptions, in particular—of sterile contemporary hotels (“no noise anywhere, just the purring of the air-conditioning”), the bleak spaces of an art museum, and impersonal trains—suggest that the world the lovers are visiting has reached, like their affair, a similar dead end. The anonymous narrator begins his account as he and Marie, a dress designer and artist invited to Tokyo to show her clothes and her art, settle into their hotel room after the long flight from Paris. As he describes how their affair began, he also offhandedly remarks that he has a bottle of hydrochloric acid with him, which he hints he might throw at Marie. This acid is almost a third protagonist in the story as the narrator carries it with him or ponders using it. The two make love but are interrupted by a phone call, and he leaves the room and wanders round the sleeping hotel. He then goes outs into the snowy streets, where he finds Marie, dressed in one of her designs, also up and about. A minor earthquake, another ominous indicator, occurs as they walk in the dawn cityscape. Later, feeling ill, he abandons Marie at the museum where she’s supervising the installation, and heads to Kyoto. Feverish and disoriented, he stays for a few days with a French friend. Recovered, acid bottle in his pocket, he heads back to Tokyo on a strangely empty bullet train. After talking to Marie on the phone, his feelings about her still ambivalent, he impulsively visits the art museum after hours. There, haunted by memories of Marie, the acid still in his coat pocket, he comes to a decision.
Edgy prose that elegantly distills a disturbing take on love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56584-853-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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