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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Something about this novel seemed very juvenile to me. Perhaps it is the thirteen-year old narrator, but I think it’s more than that. Plenty of adult literary novels use adolescent narrators. This didn’t feel like an adult literary novel. It was prob...more
Something about this novel seemed very juvenile to me. Perhaps it is the thirteen-year old narrator, but I think it’s more than that. Plenty of adult literary novels use adolescent narrators. This didn’t feel like an adult literary novel. It was probably more to do with the way the story always seemed compelled to state the obvious. It could have also had to do with the weird way in which things like sex and rape were handled. Maybe it was because all the major characters were precocious children, and none of them seemed particularly complex. I did appreciate the wacky premise, about a declining family-owned theme park that features alligator wrestling. However, I think George Saunders’ Civilwarland and also his incredible short story “Pastoralia” do more interesting things with the whole “living in a theme park” idea. Russell does a good job of describing the landscape and history of the everglades and surrounding area, especially the details about regional flora and fauna. It’s completely believable that a kid growing up in the environment of Swamplandia(!) would be intimately familiar with these species. I also appreciated the pacing of the long journey Ava takes through the swampland to the underworld. When the plot forks off into two separate narratives, Ava’s continuing in first person and Kiwi’s in third person, things started going downhill. In Ava’s sections, I had a good idea where the story was coming from, who was telling it (Ava, obviously) and why. I didn’t have that sense at all in Kiwi’s sections, especially because they started relatively late in the story. And then there was the Dredgeman’s Revelation, which appeared as a separate short story in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. It didn’t make much sense then, and it makes less sense as a very long digression in this novel. The idea of the Word of Darkness is clever, and I’m sure Russell had fun playing with that. It also facilitates duel journeys through the underworld, as required in the hero monomyth that has existed since the beginning of man’s storytelling. The twin underworld journeys of Ava and Kiwi mirror each other in ways that are not at all subtle (c.f. the Mama Weeds digression, the losses of virginity, etc.) The ending is incredibly disappointing and disheartening. Even though, basically, we are promised that everything will be okay, all the magic and mystery in the world that makes life interesting and fun for these characters gets yanked away from them with a sudden intrusion of the darkest realities of life. Ava’s Birdman turns out to be just a con man and a rapist. Osceola’s affair with a ghost turns out to be suicidal depression. I didn’t like the fact that the elements of magical realism Russell sets up so beautifully become revealed so starkly as illusions and even hoaxes. Depressing.(less)
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At 8:17 on a Friday night, around the world, everyone’s pain becomes visible. Wounds of all kinds emit a radiant light that can be seen even through clothes. It changes a lot about the way people interact. It completely changes the way healthcare wor...more
At 8:17 on a Friday night, around the world, everyone’s pain becomes visible. Wounds of all kinds emit a radiant light that can be seen even through clothes. It changes a lot about the way people interact. It completely changes the way healthcare works. It’s an interesting premise, with a poetic quality that has a lot of potential. However, the author doesn’t give this idea the full attention it might deserve. Somewhere in the second section of this book, it becomes clear that the supernatural (or “magical realist”) element whence the book is titled plays second fiddle to the notebook that gets passed from character to character. Each of the six sections of the book focuses on a character that currently has, or recently had, possession of the notebook. In fact, the actual “Illumination” is so secondary, as interesting of an idea as it is, one wonders why Brockmeier was compelled to include it. It isn’t hard to imagine a book that focuses only on the journey of the notebook and how it briefly touched the lives of those who came across it. Even in that second section, where the central character becomes obsessed with self-mutilation, it’s easy enough to imagine virtually the same story occurring without the illumination. After all, it isn’t the light emitting shining from Jason Williford’s many scabs, scars, and open wounds that fascinates him at all. It’s the pain itself. I have read a couple of other books that had this particular structure, and I’ve always been fond of it. By the structure, I mean that a minor or ancillary character in Chapter One becomes the main character in Chapter Two, and the chain reaction continues until the end, when it comes full circle—except this book never really does complete that circle. With one exception, the stories we read in the first chapters, never come back again, are never really resolved. Two of the six end in the consummation of inappropriate love affairs, which apparently cause those characters to forget about the notebook entirely. The stories are entertaining throughout, but it ends up feeling more like a collection of related short stories than it does a novel. At the same time, as short stories, the six individual sections still leave something to be desired.(less)
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
The first story in the collection, “Lures of Last Resort,” provides an interesting perspective on the dynamics of a dysfunctional family. When the protagonists father (I don’t think we ever get the boy’s first name) leaves, the boy’s reaction is not...more
The first story in the collection, “Lures of Last Resort,” provides an interesting perspective on the dynamics of a dysfunctional family. When the protagonists father (I don’t think we ever get the boy’s first name) leaves, the boy’s reaction is not overly emotional, though he does have a hint of the “seasick feeling” he remembers from when this happened before. Instead he is curious and immediately begins adapting to the new reality of not having a father. The boisterous father character drives the action in the story even though it’s from the son’s POV. The father is a classic antagonist in the literary sense and other senses, embodied in that last line, “and then I realized too late that he had drawn me into the lie so that he could catch me in it and watch me thrash around.” The fishing imagery is appropriate here also. It’s a nice touch that they catch all these fish, but they can’t eat them because the father is allergic, so they give them away or just put them in a freezer (for what later purpose, I don’t know). I also enjoyed the boy screaming “I love you Carla Van Sickle” when the fire sirens went off and nobody could hear him. In the second story, Kardos uses the same narrator, now an adult, but the tone is completely different. Gunnipuddy now works in a bowling alley where, in addition to retrieving stuck balls and fixing broken toilets, he writes fairy tales for the regulars. The story itself takes on the tone of a fairy tale, including rabbits, infants, and boxes of ashes that talk (all in voices similar to the narrator’s). Other fairy-tale like magic occurs as well, when Gunnipuddy’s tales begin coming true. We learn later this is his reward for adopting a baby his neighbors abandoned. All returns to “normal” once he learns the basics of how to take care of the child. From there, the stories continue to interconnect, using settings and minor characters from previous stories, and Kardos shifts gears effortlessly between absurd comedy and melodrama. For more dramatic moments, Kardos creates distance, using an omniscient narrator that will then suddenly settle in a character’s POV for a few paragraphs, in a couple of stories changing the narrative mode to an accusatory second-person, as if the character’s own conscience is berating him or her: “You do this. You do that.” The characters frequently have epiphanies, and these usually involve a transition from thinking everyone around them is the boring and homogenous to recognizing the value of individuals in their lives, sometimes in their own families. Themes of abandonment, divorce, and family abound. People make sudden declarations of love and change the courses of their lives as a result.(less)
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