Word: strause
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Here's a strange fable--if it has talking animals, it must be a fable--that clanks awkwardly in its mechanics but leaves a melancholy stillness as it is put back on the shelf. Kirsten Bakis' supposition in Lives of the Monster Dogs (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 291 pages; $23) is that in the year 2008, a tribe of large dogs, surgically and genetically altered, with prosthetic hands and voice boxes and with the intelligence of humans, arrives in Manhattan. The dogs walk erect, using canes, and wear costumes patterned after military uniforms and ball gowns of 19th century Prussia...
...brilliant thriller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, with a couple of mannered, too-clever fictions, A History of Danish Dreams and Borderliners, that found their balance somewhere between interesting and irritating. And the glum report here is that Hoeg's latest novel, The Woman and the Ape (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 261 pages; $23), is a disaster, part animal-rights tract and part millennial doom mongering, that looks at irritating from the underside...
...Scott Turow's legions of readers will immediately understand, this murder is only the beginning of an increasingly labyrinthine story. The Laws of Our Fathers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 534 pages; $26.95) follows Turow's three previous best-selling novels--Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof and Pleading Guilty --in its portrayal of life, death and the search for justice in the Tri-Cities area of Kindle County, an imaginary Rustbelt terrain of remarkable moral and spiritual ambiguity. Once again a sensational trial forms the ostensible center of the novel while Turow demonstrates how inadequately the order in the courtroom mirrors...
Last September, I went door-to-door for several days, campaigning and finding out what issues residents of Straus, Matthews and Massachusetts Halls cared about. Since many of them were concerned about randomization--and although I personally was undecided on its merit--I worked in the fall term discussing protests and petitions against randomization, and I tried to arrange an information session with Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 on the topic...
...novel, and the reader, hearing this news, imagines what it might be: a blare of grand attitudes and romantic bosh perhaps, or a bravura display of cynicism not quite fully baked or fully earned. But the mood of Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable Psalm at Journey's End (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 371 pages; $24), published in its original Norwegian six years ago, when the author was 25, is dreamlike, elegiac stillness, a condition not usually thought of as youthful...