Famine [Hardcover]

Todd Komarnicki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1997

A detective finds the emaciated corpse of a young man, dead of starvation, in an upscale Manhattan neighborhood and tries to recover the young man's history, in a tale of emotional and physical longing by the author of Free. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this haunting new novel by the author of Free (1993) alludes to the spiritual emptiness of its characters as much as to the literal starvation that claims the life of its protagonist, Daniel Rowan. Since the age of 14, when he inadvertently contributed to the death of his beloved younger brother, Daniel has been a troubled youth of the Holden Caulfield stripe. His fruitless quest for emotional nurturing from a family willfully oblivious to his pain culminates in his death from malnutrition, a fate so unbelievable to the investigating Detective Bell that it prompts an obsessive hunt for a possible murderer. Bell, who might have stepped out of one of Paul Auster's metaphysical mysteries, is a similarly love-starved individual who discovers increasingly eerie parallels between Daniel's life and his own as he intensely pursues Daniel's ghostly wife, Emma, as a possible suspect. Komarnicki alternates chapters presented from Daniel's and Bell's points of view, evoking, in the time and space that separates their lives, a world of unfulfilled longing and maladaptive coping as bleak and palpable as the novel's setting, Manhattan's Lower East Side. Hints of supernatural forces at work on both narrative threads subtly underscore the narrative's theme: the power of emotional need to create its own reality. A stylistic tour de force whose prose is often as spare and stark as the lives of its characters, this brooding variation on the detective tale turns the hunger for human feeling into rich food for thought.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In the heart of Manhattan, a troubled young man named Daniel dies inexplicably of malnutrition. A short time later, a workaholic cabdriver dies similarly. Police detective Daniel Bell, who discovers Daniel's body, finds a curious resonance in his namesake's story and starts an investigation into these mysterious deaths. His suspicion that something other than chance is involved proves right when he encounters the spectral Emma, Daniel's wife. Intertwining Daniel's story with that of Bell, Komarnicki (Free, Doubleday, 1993) uses the mystery form to explore deeper issues of innocence and guilt. The murderer is not so much a person as a condition?the hardness of heart that keeps individuals emotionally distant, or the addictions used to keep the world at bay. The real "famine" here is of the spirit. For most libraries.?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1st edition (January 6, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559703652
• ISBN-13: 978-1559703659
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,540,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic magical realism, August 12, 2000

By 

Robert L Earle (Pasadena, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Famine (Paperback)

This book is great. It is not a linear detective story as many who are into the "mystery" genre might hope for, but a wonderful psychological story along the lines of Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or, more recently, Arundhati Roy. Part of the beauty of the book is that it is as maddening and enchanting as living itself can be. Kudos to the author.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What's it all about?, March 13, 2000

By 

Mike "Driftless" (Chicago+Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Famine (Paperback)

I give it three stars because I think there is some beautiful evocative prose in Famine. I must admit, however, that the beauty of the language did not help me understand where the plot was going. Maybe the author wanted us to confuse the two Daniels. Maybe he wanted us to be so unsure of who did what to whom that we needed to fill in all the blanks ourselves. I thought Komarnicki's convention was ingenious, but I would have liked to feel that I had understood his intent when I finished the book. I think he could have fleshed things out a bit more for his readers. It kind of left me wondering if the time I invested in reading Famine could have been better spent reading a book that was both well written and understandable.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quietly shattering., January 23, 2001

By 

Ian Grey (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Famine (Paperback)

Indeed, the first 30 odd pages are a bit self-conciously angsty, but after that--fuggheddaboudit. Komarnicki knows and is able to boil down the most sad dark places--sans po-mo "hip" /"cool" hoohaw--into a few terse sentences that leave you, quite literally, stunned. And looking at your own life, and wondering. What higher praise is there for a book than that?