De Moor is rapidly becoming one of the world’s finest novelists.
A troubled union of two artistic temperaments feels “the powerful effects of music on our emotions,” in an elegant short novel from the internationally acclaimed Dutch author (Duke of Egypt, 2002, etc.).
De Moor’s story is a subtly elusive composition centered in two meetings, ten years apart, between the unnamed narrator, an earnest musicologist, and Marius van Vlooten, an unusually self-reliant blind music critic. They first meet when stranded together at an Amsterdam airport while awaiting a delayed flight to Bordeaux, where both are to attend a master class for string quartets. Van Vlooten reveals the cause of his blindness (a botched suicide attempt, over a failed love affair). The narrator introduces the critic to beautiful young violinist Suzanna Flier. As he later learns, the two fall in love and wed, but endure a tempestuous marriage marred by her casual (possibly adulterous?) relations with colleagues and his seething jealousy—in a manner echoing the plot of Tolstoy’s mordant novella The Kreutzer Sonata (inspired by a Beethoven chamber work and itself the source of Leos Janacek’s 1927 string quartet, which Suzanna performs, brilliantly). The details of “this spiral of passion and fate” emerge when the two men cross paths a decade later, as each is en route to the Salzburg Music Festival. The story is then concluded “sixteen years later” as the narrator—alone this time aboard an airplane—reads a newspaper account of the incident that ended the tortured “sonata” played (as it were) by Suzanna and Marius. It’s a deliciously conceived and executed mystery, seasoned with acute perceptions of how both music and life are seen, heard, and imperfectly experienced and understood by whatever senses humans command. And it’s a strikingly ingenious homage to the great originals (and copies) of Beethoven, Tolstoy, and Janacek.
De Moor is rapidly becoming one of the world’s finest novelists.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-744-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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