The book would have been more hard-hitting if Yirmi’s story had been front and center.
In this latest from Yehoshua (A Woman in Jerusalem, 2006, etc.), an Israeli family’s cohesiveness is endangered when one member, distraught over his son’s death from friendly fire, sheds his Jewish identity.
Amotz and Daniela Ya’ari have been married for 37 years. Daniela’s sister, wife of a former Israeli diplomat in Tanzania, has died from a heart attack. Daniela decides to take a weeklong trip to Africa, though even this brief separation disturbs husband and wife, whose expressions of love border on cloying. Upon Daniela’s arrival, her brother-in-law Yirmi shocks her by throwing her Israeli newspapers and Hanukkah candles in the fire. The reason emerges slowly as Yehoshua crosscuts between Africa and Tel Aviv, where Amotz runs his engineering-design company and attends to family business. These scenes showcase his abundant goodwill, a trait he shares with Daniela, but they distract from the true drama: Yirmi’s transformation. Before his wife’s death, he had lost his son Eyal to friendly fire in a Palestinian border town. Yirmi’s sleuthing revealed that the accident was Eyal’s fault, but the most searing revelation was the nature of the Israeli occupation. “The Jews are incapable of grasping how others see them,” he tells Daniela. So Yirmi has detached himself from all things Jewish, working now as financial manager for an African anthropological research team. Daniela sees in her brother-in-law the familiar figure of the self-hating Jew, but she does not speak out, and the visit ends cordially, if anti-climactically. Has Yirmi seen the truth, that the same people can be both warmhearted and oblivious to Palestinian suffering? The paradox extends to the images of fire as both savior and destroyer that suffuse the novel, the hopeful Hanukkah candles that flicker throughout making a sharp contrast with the fire that killed Eyal.
The book would have been more hard-hitting if Yirmi’s story had been front and center.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101419-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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