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HIS BROTHER

Name: HIS BROTHER
Author: Philippe Besson
ISBN: 0-434-01211-4

by Philippe Besson & translated by Frank Wynne ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005

Besson’s prose has a fatalistic Greek gravitas and a stark honesty: a moving novel as memoir.

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French novelist Besson’s second outing (after In the Absence of Men, 2003) is the spare account of a beloved brother’s untimely death. It has the sensory impact of a memoir.

Lucidly translated, the story takes the form of nonchronological diary entries written over a time period of several months, from March, when the narrator’s younger brother, Thomas Andrieu, 26, undergoes a series of tests for “spontaneous haemorrhage,” until early September, when the young man will die of a mysterious blood disease (not AIDS). Over the spring and early summer, he is hospitalized and put through a series of ignominious procedures, such as a sternal tap involving “implements of torture,” infusions of immunoglobulin and corticosteroid treatment. He is released briefly but grows precipitously worse. The spleen is announced as the culprit, and a splenectomy performed—to no avail. Lucas, his older brother by a mere 15 months, watches Thomas suffer in silent agony, notes the friends falling away from him, including his flighty, green-eyed girlfriend Claire (Lucas’s lover, Vincent, deserts him as well). Clear-eyed and unflinching, Lucas records the visits of their ineffectual parents, whose own grief becomes selfish and crippling. As children, the brothers spent their summers on the Atlantic coastal island of Île de Ré, and Lucas’s narrative weaves in early memories of the two brothers, often taken as twins. Now, having accepted Thomas’s disease as incurable, the two return, in late summer, to Saint-Clément-des-Baleines to pass the last days of Thomas’s life. There, they regularly encounter an old man on the beach whose own life is “littered with corpses.” Thomas has a theory that his illness is a kind of reckoning, and the old man’s edict that “you don’t defy the will of the ocean” at last allows him to face his death.

Besson’s prose has a fatalistic Greek gravitas and a stark honesty: a moving novel as memoir.

Pub Date: July 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-434-01211-4

Page Count: 146

Publisher: William Heinemann/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LIE WITH ME
by Philippe Besson and translated by Molly Ringwald

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN
by Philippe Besson & translated by Frank Wynne

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.