Whatever their ostensible subjects, most of these pieces are about looking closely and paying attention.
The title suggests a miscellany, which this collection of 88 short pieces certainly delivers.
These sketches, essays, parables, prose poems, newspaper pieces, maybe even diary entries by the enigmatic Swiss author (A Schoolboy’s Diary, 2013, etc.) were written during the first third of the 20th century, right up to the point when the previously prolific writer was hospitalized for anxiety and depression in 1933. He was 55 at the time, and he never published again, though he lived another two decades. Many of these pieces consist of a single, dense paragraph, and few run much longer than a page. Recurring motifs concern a man (characters rarely have names) who encounters an attractive woman in a pastoral setting, a man who feels similarly attracted and seduced by a personification of nature (in “The Goddess,” the title character is a cloud in a sunny sky), a man who ponders his own process of writing or that of others. In “Walser on Walser,” he opens, “Here you can hear Walser the writer speaking” and asks, “Is it perhaps asleep in me, my passion for writing?” Many of the pieces open with commentary on the piece the reader is about to read or close with reference to the piece the reader is finishing. Some of them are character studies that suggest just how hard it is for anyone to know anyone, including oneself. The earliest pieces are the most conventionally storylike, with hints of plot. In “She Writes,” a woman who served as an artist’s model begins her letter, “Hey, old monster” and addresses him as his supplicant, critic, and accuser, haranguing him for money after she feels he has done her ill. “You pretend it’s me you painted in this picture? No, swine, that’s neither I nor any girl who exists; rather it merely bears a few rough similarities to womanhood.” Considered by contemporaries to be an inspiration for Kafka and a kindred spirit, Walser is generally lighter and more playful and very attuned to detail. “We need only open our eyes and look around carefully to see valuable things,” he writes, “if we look at them closely enough and with a certain degree of attention.”
Whatever their ostensible subjects, most of these pieces are about looking closely and paying attention.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-016-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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