A few shattering days in the life of a broken and desperate young man.
A Québécois bestseller thankfully arrives for English readers.
One can see how this bleak bildungsroman attracted so much attention in Canada, despite the nihilism it wears on its sleeve, because it captures a singular voice as well as the blood, sweat, and tears of life in the trenches of a restaurant kitchen. Larue's debut novel, translated from the French by Strauss, reads like a cross between the dearly departed Anthony Bourdain and Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, combining the complicated life of a kitchen wretch with a highly literate voice. It’s also complicated by a narrator who's deeply troubled but endlessly fascinating in the manner of the Beats’ beautiful losers. Stéphane, an artist, college student, metal head, and inveterate gambler, who shares the name of his creator, is a loser by any definition of the word. He’s screwed friends, relatives, and a death metal band called Deathgaze over an album cover for which he’s been paid thousands but gambled away. At the behest of his compassionate cousin, Malik, our narrator gets his shit together enough to get a job as a dishwasher at a high-end Montreal restaurant. Stéphane’s tales of his struggles with addiction are as dizzying as any alcoholic memoir, while his drunken adventures—with a crew that includes his mentor and enabler, Bébert; a flat-out criminal named Greg; the ex he sort-of pines after; and other archetypal characters that flit in and out of his orbit—are captivating. “Nothing ever works out for me,” Stéphane moans to Bébert one night, and while it’s worth it to see if that’s true in the end, watching him screw up over and over is hypnotizing all by itself; Stéphane’s arc toward self-destruction is outright malignant.
A few shattering days in the life of a broken and desperate young man.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77196-269-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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