Written in 1952, Queer remained unprinted all these years, its publishers tell us, because of its "candid homosexual content, and. . .its author's own reluctance to make public the painful events it recounts." So now, in our latter-day age of liberation, we get to see it at last: a faded-trendy piece of 1950s hip arcana that preserves, if anything, a thin, petulant narcissism of feeling that might once upon a time have passed fleetingly for depth, however it may or may not be related to the development of the later Burroughs. Lee, American expatriate in Mexico City in the late 1940s, falls in love with the reluctant young Allerton, and, from the start, we're in for an affair that reads often now like one of the lesser forms of genre romance ("Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face"). As for feeling, we know it's deep, because the author says so, time and again, when Allerton holds back from Lee: "Lee was deeply hurt"; "Lee was depressed and shattered"; "He felt a deep hurt. . . Tears ran down his face." A ludicrous, comic-strip shorthand becomes more apparent in the narrative after Allerton agrees to serve as Lee's companion on a trip to South America, a trip that becomes a search for Yage, a thought-control drug: "'A Colombian scientist who lives in Bogota isolated Telepathine from Yage. We must find that scientist.'" Later, another clue takes them deep into the jungle: "'A botanist! What a break. He is our man. We will go tomorrow.'" What happens? The search for the drug is futile. Allerton drops Lee. Lee drifts back to Mexico City. Lee is cosmically sad. Burroughs explains in his introduction that all of this occurs while Lee is withdrawing from junk, and that's one reason (read the introduction to find out the other) why "a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages" of the book. It's a good thing he mentions the smog, so you'll be sure to notice it when you go back; what Burroughs doesn't do, though, is say much about why the book now reads so artificial, posed, thin, contrived, and silly, albeit with some effective travelogue footage. First printing of 30,000. Certainly more than enough.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1985
ISBN: 0143117831
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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