OK, Mr. Field

Starred review from May 21, 2018
Kilalea’s striking, singular debut constructs an eerie world of replicas, repetitions, and doubles that contrasts the utopian ideals of a modernist house with the irreversibly damaged soul who inhabits it. Narrator Mr. Field is close to inhuman, a lethargic obsessive recovering from a traumatic injury that ends his career as a concert pianist. He retires to one of three replicas of a modernist masterpiece, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, in Cape Town, South Africa. Perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the house is a “grand white box... rising from the rocks on its thin white stilts as if signifying, albeit tenuously, the victory of architecture over nature.” Meanwhile, a developer begins construction on a fanciful housing project next door, a “tower of cowsheds” rising up into the clouds, as Mr. Field’s life and home fall into disrepair. Mr. Field’s wife, Mim, vanishes, leaving behind cryptic notes about the sea; the house’s windows fall out and weeds encroach; and Mr. Field hears the voice of the villa’s former occupant in his head, then tirelessly stalks her in real life. The novel is as opaque as its central character, but Kilalela maintains a balance between formal control and the irrational mystery of a man who is a “stranger to self.” The result is a disorienting and enthralling descent into one man’s peculiar malaise. Agent: Anna Webber, United Agents.

June 15, 2018
A concert pianist finds his life and mind drifting after an accident damages his hand in this gloomy, evocative novel.Mr. Field is sleeping when the book starts. He is sleeping when a train crash shatters his left wrist. He is sleeping when his wife leaves him. The scant story he narrates alternates between stark reality and a dreamlike limbo, specifics and vagueness. With the compensation money he receives, he buys a white house, a box on stilts, that overlooks the sea on the Capetown coast of South Africa and was designed by an admirer of Le Corbusier. Mr. Field--no definite first name is given--meets the admirer's widow, who lives nearby, and she soon haunts his waking life. He spends time peeping through her garden window. He often encounters a stray dog in a graveyard when he's out walking. In the widow's sitting room, a Chagall-like print shows a woman, a dog, and a rudimentary box of a house. Near Mr. Field's house, a circular residential tower is being built. He wanders around his house, which is in a state of decay, as is Mr. Field. He is sad about his lost career and lost wife. His sadness wearies him: "I was so tired of being sad." Maybe his wife found his sadness tiresome. Before she left, she played computer solitaire and studied the sea, writing observations in a notebook he later finds. Kilalea, who grew up in South Africa and whose previous book, One Eye'd Leigh, was a poetry collection that hasn't been published in the U.S., conjures from precise prose and elements as basic and fraught as Tarot card images--sea, widow, wife, round tower, box house, sad man--a kind of tone poem that seems at times forced but ultimately resonates well beyond one man's depression.An auspicious debut that challenges the reader to follow the progress of mental distress and bravely offers little relief from the painful sight.

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June 1, 2018
Modernist architecture and the properties of water inform this poetic tale about a concert pianist who, following the abrupt end of his career and his marriage, becomes increasingly disoriented by his surroundings. His wrist mangled in a train crash, Mr. Field impulse-spends his settlement money on the House for the Study of Water, a Le Corbusier-inspired curiosity perched high above a rugged coast near Cape Town. The house implies the victory of architecture over nature, but its views of the sea are constrained by narrow horizontal windows, and its stark geometry of glass and concrete seems intended to confound those who, like our protagonist, tend to linger in moments of reverie. Mr. Field fixates on leaks in the ceiling, the ever-changing ocean, and the musical clamor of a nearby construction site while indulging in a pretend conversation with Hannah Kallenbach, the estranged wife of the building's designer. Although his obsessions create a gentle forward momentum, the focus is on his fragile, impressionistic state of mind. In her first novel, distinguished poet Kilalea describes Mr. Field's emotions in a devastatingly evocative fashion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2018

In this fiction debut from a Costa Poetry Award short-listed author, concert pianist Mr. Field suffers a career-threatening injury and retreats with his wife to a Cape Town villa he buys with his compensation check. The house has a disturbing effect on the couple, and soon Mr. Field starts going mad. Serialized in the Paris Review.

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