Trademark Modiano, brittle and elegant, with more questions than answers.
Brooding, philosophically rich novel by Modiano (Missing Person, 2014, etc.), recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature.
Jean B. is a filmmaker—a documentary filmmaker, more precisely, and one constantly on the go from continent to continent and culture to culture: “I was just back from Oceania,” he recalls, “and I was to leave for Rio de Janeiro a few days later.” This tour finds him on a short layover in Milan while traveling to Paris by train—and everyone knows that you don’t go to Milan in August, when everyone is gone or hiding from the heat. Apparently the heat is too much, or something is too much in any event, for another traveler, Ingrid Theysen, who, Jean learns, killed herself a couple of days earlier after drinking just the same drink he has now ordered. It’s not the drink’s fault but instead the weight of the whole oppressive 20th century: the war, the occupation, the whole bit. The thing is, Jean knew Ingrid two decades earlier, when she’d brightly said, “We’ll pretend to be dead.” Why should Ingrid want to do so? What secret did she hold—and how about Rigaud, the fellow whom she’d run off with during the war, leaving it to her poor parents to place advertisements begging for information about their missing daughter? Modiano is in high mystery mode as Jean sets out to retrace Ingrid’s steps past “groups of German soldiers and French policemen,” hugging the walls while trying to avoid being seen. And why? Well, there’s the nub, and Modiano takes his time solving the puzzle and then not filling in every blank—not least the one that might tell us why Jean should be interested in the first place. Along the way, he coolly evokes the black-and-white grittiness of France in the early 1960s, when so many were trying to forget the events of 20 years before, and leaves much of the rest to the reader’s imagination.
Trademark Modiano, brittle and elegant, with more questions than answers.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56792-538-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Verba Mundi
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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