Hitchcock – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl /2014/night-film-by-marisha-pessl/ Sat, 11 Jan 2014 18:00:56 +0000 /?p=25001 Book Quote:

“Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.

Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again.  Or, your boyfriend bragged he’d discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching, refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal he’d barely survived.  

Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferent—-he’s there to react against.  He’s a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world.  He’s underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark.  He’s down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day. 

He’s a myth, a monster, and a mortal man.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 11, 2014)

This psychological, genre-bursting/ busting literary thriller took me on a high-speed chase into a Byzantine rabbit hole into the quirkiest, eeriest, darkest parts of the soul. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath is on a quest to exhume the facts of a young piano prodigy’s tragic end. Ashley Cordova, 24, daughter of cult-horror film director, Stanislav Cordova, was found dead–allegedly a suicide. The now reclusive director (30 years isolated from known whereabouts) is the reason for McGrath’s ruined reputation five years ago, and Scott is hungry to turn things around, upside down, and inside out to pursue Cordova again and save himself. And to disinter the “truth,” which itself can be an illusory concept in this cat and mouse thriller.

Along the way, McGrath assembles a motley group of two with their own agendas for chasing after the true story of Ashley’s death. It’s almost unbelievable that Scott would let these potential loose cannons join up with him, a virtual loner, but Pessl gives it cred by keeping the reader in an ever-tunneling and tumbling maze of intellectual, emotional, and horror-filled murk. Whatever mental notes you take as the narrative builds, the ever-widening cast and real, random, red herring, or suspect clues keep you from perseverating too long on the questionable partnerships. Each untangled knot corkscrews around to create ropier more entangled ones.

Mind games and magic, or mind games vs magic, is explored in a way that transports you to the most subterranean reaches of the human psyche. Pessl’s penetrating use of symbolism, allegory, literary allusion, and metaphor saturates the story with a weighty unease and anxiety that reflect her incomparable understanding of the human condition–(not to mention a rarefied channeling of hallucinogenic experiences). In Night Film, mind over matter is a daring question with a dangerous reckoning.

Pessl is obviously familiar with Hitchcock’s work, as well as the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrik. Additionally, the iconic 40’s noir films infuse Night Film with oblique shadows and moral ambiguity and imbue it with mixed media from the Internet age. Throw in a little Stephen King to the mix, too. However, Pessl’s use of pastiche is brushed and buffed into her own variegated style, with a voice that is strikingly poetic. She winks at and pays homage more than she mimics.

The gritty and shadowy streets, railway tracks, bridges, and warehouses of New York; the dark silhouette of the Adirondacks against a night sky; mansions sitting like a pit bull on a bluff; the mist obscuring the hand or a face or the gnarled limb of a tree–all Pessl’s ethereal images suffuse the story with an almost sepulchral ambiance. There were times I jumped while reading, certain I heard a cup rattling on a shelf, or saw a light flickering behind a curtain. At other times, my heart melted, especially when Scott would successfully enlist his five-year-old daughter to help his investigation. She was uncannily guileless but aware and persuasive.

The overriding theme can be found in the first lines of the book, a quote from Stanislav Cordova that begins the prologue:

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

What happens when we break through our cocoon and walk to the edge and back? Are we blinding ourselves to our true nature, and to the nature of others, when we attempt to hold desperately onto those we love?

“Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing down.”

This is at turns comical, disturbing, terrifying, tragic, tender, and spiritually poetic. The pace is breakneck and pitch-perfect electric, despite its florid and exuberant sentences, and the prose is evocative, aphoristic, savvy. It’s relentless and addictive, no time to catch your breath before you are falling through another black hole.

If you prefer a straight-up horror or crime-solving genre, this may not please you. Pessl breaks the rules and the mold, and the narrative is as much philosophy and metaphysics as it is mystery and mysticism. I was chasing shadows and rainbows in equal measure.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 562 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (August 20, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Marisha Pessl
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> WHAT YOU SEE IN THE DARK by Manuel Munoz /2011/what-you-see-in-the-dark-by-manuel-munoz/ Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:48:02 +0000 /?p=17042 Book Quote:

“You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 28, 2011)

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz’s stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock’s lens—the camera as observer’s tool and observer as camera–with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director’s noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950’s, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99. Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa’s love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of the iconic movie we know today as PSYCHO. The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots for the motel, and during the illustrious shower scene. The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to Hitchcock. The author’s interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader’s suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course—the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral. I was academically stimulated by the author’s style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn’t emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 17 readers
PUBLISHER: Algonquin Books (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Manuel Muñoz
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Psycho:

Bibliography:

]]> POINT OMEGA by Don DeLillo /2010/point-omega-by-don-delillo/ Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:07:06 +0000 /?p=7888 Book Quote:

“Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft (FEB 19, 2010)

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a slim and subtle novel. It is so slim that very little happens and so subtle that the reader will be left to question exactly what happened here and what any of it means.

The book begins and ends with with the viewing of a film exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is called 24 Hour Psycho and it screens Hitchcock’s famous movie in slow motion, without sound, for a full twenty-four hours.

In between these brief, stark, descriptive, passages is the story of the narrator Jim Finley who has installed himself in the isolated, desert home of Richard Elster who, until recently, had been an advisor to President Bush. Elster came from academia and his presence in the administration was to add credibility and depth to the decisions made by the government. His exact job in the administration was to place the war into some kind of context, to give it meaning, find a metaphor that the administration could use. To Finley, he refers to his job as “bulk and swagger” which is closer to cloak and dagger than to “shock and awe.”

Finley is a novice filmmaker who wants to make a documentary of Elster speaking to the camera and telling the story of his role in the administration, his thoughts on the war, politics, everything. But Elster has fallen silent even before he consents to do the film. The two men spend a lot of time together, alone in the house, drinking on Elston’s deck, watching the sun set.

After a week of this near silence, Elster’s daughter, Jessie, comes for a visit, which only reminds Finley of his own loneliness and urges. He continues to pursue Elston professionally while he fantasizes about the daughter.

This routine ends a couple days later when Jessie very suddenly disappears and the story takes an abrupt shift into the realm of personal mysteries and loss.

This shift must be a cue from Psycho where the lead character was killed off early in the story. Psycho began as a heist film, turned into a private detective story and then morphed again into something quite unsettling. With its impersonal violence it raised questions about the genre of crime fiction and how quaint its methods were next to random violence.

Point Omega seems to raise the question of how anyone can find meaning in violence and loss. The book also toys with the idea of stories and their meanings. It begins like a reversal of Darkness at Noon with the meek artist trying to goad answers from the powerful party official. Then, with the arrival of Elster’s daughter, the story meanders into a retelling of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, where young Nathan Zuckerman gets to meet his idol but is eventually sidetracked by lust for the old man’s daughter.

But then Point Omega changes once more with Finley and Elster, alone together again, searching for some kind of expressible meaning in the disappearance of a single woman. Next to this emptiness how could anyone explain the overwhelming violence and unfairness of an entire war?

Most of DeLillo’s major writing has been event-oriented like the toxic plume in White Noise or the windup pitch of Underworld. Vivid characters have never been his strength. For this short book with only one real plot point occurring, more characterization would have helped. Elster himself points to the book’s flaw when he tells Finley what a bad idea their film would be: “But isn’t there a real movie you’d rather do? Because how many people will want to spend all that time looking at something so zombielike?”

DeLillo is a major American writer but he still has yet to create a character that captures the collective heart of his readership. No Garp, no Zuckerman, no Sam Spade. With all the premature deaths in Psycho, the audience still got to hold on to Norman Bates.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 43 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner; First Edition (February 2, 2010)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s America
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Complete Review on Point Omega
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our short review of:

White Noise

Bibliography:

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