Read Bolaño, and you’ll understand what he means.
Exile, alienation and a fatalistic sense of the impermanence of human connections and relations dominate this collection of 14 stories written by the late (1953–2003), brilliant Chilean author.
Bolaño (who sometimes appears in the stories, identified as “B.”) was a leftist intellectual haunted by lingering fallout from his country’s political catastrophes (notably, a 1973 military coup), including destroyed marriages and families, betrayed ideals and unrealized dreams. His stories—which echo the allegorical terseness of his recently translated novels By Night in Chile (2003) and Distant Star (2004)—phlegmatically record such unconsummated or indistinct experiences as an unnamed writer’s friendship through correspondence with an older writer whose burden of hardships is too complex to be shared (“Sensini”); a failed poet’s compensation for his artistic ineptness in an imaginative escape from reality (“Enrique Martin”); a Chilean exile’s gradually revelatory encounter with a countryman unmanned and enervated by the annihilation of his hopes for a more just society (“Days of 1978”); and a minor writer’s small triumph when he acts as “secretary, messenger, or valet” to more accomplished contemporaries during the perilous days of the French Resistance (“Henri Simon Leprince”). A few stories (“Phone Calls,” “Anne Moore’s Life”) misfire or fail to play to Bolaño’s strengths (the uncharacteristically comic “Gómez Palacio,” the fragmentary autobiographical piece “Dance Card”). But at his best, he echoes the elliptical precision of Borges, Kafka, Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo and the great prestidigitator Julio Cortázar—notably, in the superb title story, which portrays a young intellectual’s Acapulco vacation with his father as a slowly dawning apprehension of approaching death; and the subtly exfoliating “Dentist,” in which exchanges of stories and a vision of how they’re made confirms for its narrator (what he has already intuited) that “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”
Read Bolaño, and you’ll understand what he means.Pub Date: May 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-8112-1634-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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