A perfectly pitched anatomy of the immigrant experience of America: a moving blend of character study, satire, and elegy.
This nicely constructed and deeply felt novel, which marks the first English-language appearance of a former Russian scientist and translator, deftly observes the interactions of several Russian immigrants in America at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The émigrés are brought together for the last days of Alik, a free-spirited painter (his Last Supper depicts a table laden with 12 pomegranates) who’s slowly dying of an undiagnosed paralytic disease. His wife Nina, a paranoid alcoholic, begs the agnostic Alik to undergo baptism—a ceremony he agrees to discuss with a priest, if a rabbi is also present. As a sweltering heat wave bathes Alik’s rundown Manhattan apartment, his various friends, caregivers, and former lovers come and go (as, in nested flashbacks, Ulitskaya traces their personal histories): Irina, a onetime circus acrobat and freelance exotic dancer, now a lawyer, who quietly pays the blithely destitute Alik’s medical bills; beautiful, lovelorn Valentina, lured to America for what turned out to be a “fictitious” marriage; elderly, gnomelike Maria Ignatevna, a grandmotherly dispenser of “magical powers and contraband herbs”; and Alik’s self-appointed physician Fima, a doctor who can’t pass his US medical exams and works as a lab assistant; and some dozen others. Ulitskaya displays a keen eye for minutiae that vividly reveal character and situational contrasts (“The rabbi sat on the stool . . . which was still warm from the priest’s buttocks”) and images that precisely evoke the experiences of alienation and lostness (such as Alik’s dream in which, forced to hold the leashes of a pack of struggling dogs, he misses a flight and is unable to leave Moscow). And the contrast between Russian stoic fatalism and Americans’ casual sense of their society’s invincibility are spelled out in numerous delicately chosen details, each simultaneously underscoring her characters’ very distinctive personalities.
A perfectly pitched anatomy of the immigrant experience of America: a moving blend of character study, satire, and elegy.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-8052-4185-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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