The weather in Bausch’s world is never better than overcast, but his craftsmanship lights up something fine in the gloom.
Interesting people in various painful predicaments find ways to muddle through.
The current collection of 14 stories from Bausch (Before, During, After, 2014, etc.), considered one of our living masters of fiction, demonstrates the author’s lightning-quick ability to develop complex, unique characters and situations, and the title tells a lot about its throughline. The “weather of the world” refers to the aspects of life that are out of our control, and the stories examine how we choose to make our peace with them—a theme made explicit in a story called “Map Reading,” about two gay siblings who, through circumstance and inertia, have been of no help to one another in their travails. The brother “had always been inclined to gloomy reflections. Friends remarked on it. With several of them he had formed a casual club that never met, called the Doom Brothers Club.” When his younger half sister wonders whether everyone in the world isn’t “living in sin,” he observes, “Everyone’s living in whatever weather there is where they are.” This story, like many in the collection, finishes on a note of lingering sadness, and several stories deal with male protagonists making big mistakes in romance. The cop in the first one, “Walking Distance,” pays the price for an excess of uxoriousness, while the painter in “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” becomes distracted from the treasure he already has by one sparkling beyond his reach. The confessed adulterer in “We Belong Together” has an unpleasant surprise in store, and the newlywed in “The Hotel Macabre” makes the error of allowing his odious sister to join him and his bride on their honeymoon. In one of the few stories from a female point of view, “Night,” the male partner is a violent abuser; other stories examine damaged men from a closer perspective, particularly “Veterans Night,” about young men who have served in Iraq, and “Still Here, Still There,” about a near-centenarian pair from World War II.
The weather in Bausch’s world is never better than overcast, but his craftsmanship lights up something fine in the gloom.Pub Date: April 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49482-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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