Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.
Houellebecq, who writes in French and lives in Dublin, offers a second try (after Whatever, 1999) that’s said to be a hit abroad. Often pretentious—or flat-footed—it nevertheless holds the reader solidly with its guess about mankind’s biological future.
In the late 1950s, two brothers are born to the same hedonistic and socially rebellious mother, by different fathers; both of the boys (since none of the parents—all brilliant—is much interested in them) are raised by grandparents and, in the case of one, sent then to boarding school, where miseries are unspeakable as older boys torment and torture him. That’s Bruno, two years older than Michel, who, luckier than Bruno in living with a beloved grandmother, proves to be ultra brainy. The novel trudges on through the lives of these two brothers, Michel turning inward (seemingly more and more incapable of expressiveness or of love) and drifting toward becoming the molecular biologist who will later change humanity forever, and the ultra-sexed Bruno going through intensities of sexual experimentation that will end in madness. Least believable may be the descriptions of Bruno’s forays through the sex-camps and -clubs of France (“ ‘Sophie,’ he said with heartfelt emotion, ‘I’d like to lick your pussy’ ”), though contenders lie also in long unrealistic “conversations” on relevant topics (Huxley, utopianism) and in Houellebecq’s tendency toward the ungrounded pronouncement (“A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975 . . .”). And yet, all this having been said, the working out of these lives does gain power and the sheer ambition of what Houellebecq is aiming for slowly becomes clear. Probing for the primal definitions of personality and emotion, he sets Michel to his work in molecular DNA discoveries—and introduces a narrator speaking to us from 2079 to explain the awesome and ironic revolution that’s been brought about.
Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40770-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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