A search for the painful and awkward wellsprings of the novelistic imagination.
In Croatian novelist Novak's English-language debut, a young novelist is forced to confront the terrible moment in his childhood when his career as a fable-maker began, not by choice but by necessity.
Matija is a writer with two well-received novels behind him, but he's been floundering for more than a year now on a follow-up, and one by one his trusted readers are confirming what he has suspected: It's going nowhere. Meanwhile, Matija's girlfriend, Dina, with whom he's been happy, issues an ultimatum: He has to keep his inventions confined to fiction, has to stop being so deceitful—or is it just evasive?—about his childhood. As a test, Dina brings several old photos for him to explicate. Matija does so, at length and feelingly, before Dina tearfully informs him that the photos are fakes; she has doctored them herself, and they have nothing to do with him. After Dina dumps him, Matija reluctantly decides to revisit an epoch he has utterly expunged from memory—the years before, at age 7, he and his family left their village in Međimurje for Zagreb at the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991. Coming to grips with that past requires him to excavate the lonely, awful, bewildering period immediately after his father's death, a stretch whose agonies culminated in an epidemic of eight suicides in Matija's village. That suicide cluster attracted attention not only to the village, but to a particular little boy, in the research called M.D., who knew all the victims and who was thought by some (perhaps including himself) to be obscurely responsible. Novak captures well the way that grief may isolate, dislocate, and unmoor the bereaved, especially if it's a child left largely to fend for himself. The boy Matija wanders the countryside looking for his dead father and trying to negotiate for his return—from the police, from the land itself, and from the folkloric "will-o'-the-wisps" who inhabit the region.
A search for the painful and awkward wellsprings of the novelistic imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1610-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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