Yehoshua's masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end,...
Noga, an Israeli harpist based in the Dutch city of Arnhem, confronts hidden truths about herself during a visit to Jerusalem following the death of her loving father.
The 42-year-old Noga has agreed to stay for three months in her family's old apartment in an increasingly Orthodox section of Jerusalem while her mother tries out a retirement home in Tel Aviv. Noga's younger brother, Honi, a media producer, devised the plan. To keep Noga busy, he sets her up as an extra in various productions, among them an outdoor staging of the opera Carmen. The drama onstage is nearly met by the drama off it when Noga's ex-husband, Uriah, shows up. Though he's remarried and the father of two, he's still furious at her for her refusal to have children. Judging from her hilarious efforts to prevent the Hasidic kids from the apartment upstairs from brazenly sneaking into her mother's place to watch TV, she may not be cut out for motherhood. Noga reserves her greatest love for music; nothing thrills her more than joining her orchestra in an upcoming performance of Mozart's “Concerto for Flute and Harp.” But as hinted at by her father's advice to always keep an eye out for Venus, from which her Hebrew name derives, the universe has its own designs on her. The ease with which Yehoshua captures the inner life of his quirky heroine in all its lush undertones and self-enforced solitude is special. For the great author of Five Seasons (1988) and The Liberated Bride (2003), this is a comparatively short book. But its terse, offhand narrative is rich in reflection and personal truth.
Yehoshua's masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end, surprisingly suspenseful.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-60970-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
IN THE NEWS
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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