Good fun, and blissfully inconclusive, as befits a shaggy-dog story of unending reincarnations.
Brigadoon meets Claude Lévi-Strauss in a pleasing tale of the supernatural.
David Mazon is the sort one would suspect lives in his mom’s basement. In his mid-30s, he finally bestirs himself to finish his doctoral dissertation in anthropology, a field project that takes him from Paris to the rural French village of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe. “Malinowski notes that insects and reptiles are the principal obstacles to the work of the ethnologist,” Mazon writes in his journal, and while reptiles are comparatively scarce, there are plenty of worms and bugs in his bivouac. Little does he know that they’re unfortunately transmigrated human souls: “As David Mazon...poured half a bottle of bleach over the red annelids taking over his bathroom, he was unaware that he was returning to the Wheel the black souls of murderers whose vicious crimes had condemned them to many generations of suffering.” Every living thing in the village was once something or someone else. La Pierre-Saint-Christophe is the perfect venue for recycling the dead; undertaking is a big business and Death has cut a deal: Each year the Grim Reaper will take time off so the funerary guild can enjoy a weekend of hard partying, whence Énard’s title. Led by the mayor, Martial Pouvreau, they’re a Rabelaisian crew, given to high-flown oratory between blackouts; as the feast opens Pouvreau proclaims, “we shall drink until we drop, still struggling to make our gastral gurglings intelligible.” Énard has rollicking good fun with his tale, and although not much happens outside metamorphosis, drunkenness, and David making fumbling efforts at romance while eventually resolving to abandon social science for farming, Énard playfully works some of the same ecumenical ground as in earlier novels such as Compass (2017) and Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (2018), drawing on the sometimes-colliding tenets of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
Good fun, and blissfully inconclusive, as befits a shaggy-dog story of unending reincarnations.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780811231299
Page Count: 432
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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