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the complete review - fiction

Kensington Gardens

by
Rodrigo Fresán

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : excessive, but well done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, but some very impressed (at least by aspects of it)

  From the Reviews:

• "Rodrigo Fresán hat sich durch den viktorianischen Schriftsteller und sein Theatermonster zur Schöpfung eines schillernden Romanmonsters verführen lassen. (...) Das alles ist klug choreographiert, gekonnt einstudiert, meisterlich konstruiert. Aber gleichzeitig so künstlich wie der Name Peter Hook. (...) Ein schimmerndes, ein schlaues Buch." - Alexandra Kedves, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Sections are really quite spectacular, and the novel fizzes with ideas and energy. However, ultimately, it is unclear quite what one is meant to make of it all, and the conclusion simply evaporates." - Jerome de Groot, The Guardian
  
  
• "It is a generous, rambling novel that owes a great deal to the magic-realist tradition, with its interlinked stories, improbable events and exaggerated coincidences. Full of allusions, wordplay and jokes, it must have been a nightmare to translate, and Natasha Wimmer's version is excellent. (...) Kensington Gardens is a book you will adore for its ingenuity and energy and its zest for language -- or hate for its self-indulgence." - Michael Eaude, The Independent
  
  
• "Bouncing among Victorian England, the swinging '60s of Hook's childhood and the present, Fresán beautifully and grandly captures the mind of a madman who's caught in an all-too-ordinary dilemma: A little boy who didn't want to grow up, Hook has now become something much more monstrous than an adult." - Christine Smallwood, The Nation
  
  
• "Although he has done his research -- obsessively, judging from the long bibliographic note at the end of the novel -- Fresán has rightly depended on the power of the imagination to create the landscape of such extraordinary times (.....) Kensington Gardens, which has received a hypnotically readable translation from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is written in a lyrical and embittered prose that seems to dance in delight at the ideas it is building into marvellous neo-Gothic structures." - Jenny Diski, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Fortunately, Fresán has not set out merely to chronicle, under the cloak of fiction, Barrie's intriguing life. (...) Rather than a single narrative, Kensington Gardens is an interweaving of many stories." - Alberto Manguel, The Observer
  
  
• "Kensington Gardens, plotless and perorating with the repetition of dreams and the ego at the helm, is in the end too much of a game." - Phyllis Fong, The Village Voice
  
  
• "(T)his extraordinary novel, Rodrigo Fresán's brilliant, maddening phantasmagoria, Kensington Gardens. (...) Fresán's tour de force is even more impressive when one considers the reams of print and celluloid devoted to Barrie, and how difficult it is to find something new to say about the diminutive Scot's supremely strange, melancholy life. Alas, Fresán's ambitious narrative ploy results in way too much authorial doodling." - Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Fresáns Roman ist ein Irrlicht, er schwankt zwischen Erzählung, Essay und Biographie, hat sich bei Borges die Vertracktheit geborgt, und das Buch wäre zeitgemäß, wenn es die postmodernen Spielchen bleiben ließe. (...) Ein bemerkenswert garstiges Buch." - Wieland Freund, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Kensington Gardens is narrated by the writer of an enormously (on a Harry Potter-scale) successful series of children's books centred around a boy named Jim Yang whose 'chronocycle' allows him to essentially bicycle through time. Written under the pen-name of 'Peter Hook', the author isn't so much obsessed by Peter Pan as by his creator, J.M.Barrie, and the novel unfolds as a dual-biography of Barrie and Hook. Hook is a storyteller, and in this case he also has an audience -- a captive audience, as it turns out: he is recounting these stories to child-actor Keiko Kai, who plays Jim Yang in the movie Hook has finally allowed to be made. But while Keiko Kai is being addressed by the narrator, the boy isn't a very active participant: he's there to listen, and Hook's account is one long confessional monologue.
       Hook's birth coincided with Peter Pan's death -- 5 April, 1960, when Peter Llewelyn Davies, the 'real' Peter Pan committed suicide. And there are other similarities that make Hook see his own life as Barrie's doubled-over, including a brother (and mother's favourite) who died in childhood.
       Hook's father was Sebastian "Darjeeling" Compton-Lowe who had a band -- "the Beaten aka the Beaten Victorians aka the Victorians" -- and was perhaps best known for his "nearly demented -- but very funny -- hatred of the Beatles". Mom was Lady Alexandra Swinton-Menzies. His parents are instrumental in making him who he becomes, but it's a complex relationship -- further complicated by the boating accident that took the father's life and most of the mother's mind. But they were a part of the London 1960s, and so Hook was exposed to everything (including, accidentally, LSD) and seemingly everyone. (Fresán is very good in suggesting the famous and the times, but he does indulge in an awful lot of name-dropping.)
       There are several major themes explored in the novel, and not surprisingly childhood is one of the central ones. In one of his books Hook has his hero meet the Peter Pan-author, where:

Jim Yang and Barrie theorize about the nature of childhood. Jim Yang can't grow up and Barrie doesn't want to grow up. They're complementary opposites.

     Childhood was invented by adults. Childhood can only be appreciated from adulthood, so all children's books are nothing but more or less desperate exercises in nostalgia and revenge.

Jim Yang scares me. I'm terrified by the effect he's had on the behavior of young readers, of those fans who wait for each book as if it's their salvation. And I'm even more terrified by the way Jim Yang has gradually devoured my life and past.

we're never born in the era that suits us best. All of us are lost, in one way or another.

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Links:

• Faber publicity page

• doe-eyed critic
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian (scroll down for review)
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Nation (scroll down for review)
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• The Washington Post
• Die Welt (German)

• The Invented Part

• See Index of Latin and South American literature
• See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

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About the Author:

       Rodrigo Fresán was born in Argentina and now lives in Spain.

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© 2006-2021 the complete review

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