One (many, actually) of the world’s great stories, in immensely attractive and reader-friendly form. Essential reading.
Western readers should welcome this “huge panorama of conflict and epic adventure,” announced as the fullest prose translation yet of the 11th-century national epic of Persia (now Iran).
Written over a span of 35 years by the accomplished poet Ferdowsi, it’s a lavish tale based on earlier oral epics and a royally commissioned national history, composed in some 60,000 couplets (which compare roughly with 100,000 lines of English verse). The book begins as a conflation of indigenous myths and legends, then traces several centuries’ worth of royal reigns (hence its subtitle), and concludes following the seventh-century Arab invasion of Persia that toppled the long-lived Sasanian dynasty and irreversibly altered a proud ancient culture. The poem is thus simultaneously a chronicle of kingship (which includes very pointed references to monarchs’ responsibilities to their subjects); a saga of complex relations between rulers and the military men who serve (and, sometimes, oppose) them; and a vast succession of stories of power struggles and portraits of heroes and villains, humans and supernatural foes, and families and regimes divided. Its choicest contents include: the tale of introverted Kay Khosrow’s troubled reign and eventual abdication; the adventures of Seyavash (a kind of Persian Marco Polo); the mixed morality deployed by royal consort Shirin (a classic survivor, against formidable odds); the story of Iraj, which partially echoes that of Old Testament hero Joseph; the conquests, and eventual death, of the invader Sekandar (i.e., Alexander the Great); and the richly detailed history of soldier-hero Rustum (known to us through Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem “Sohrab and Rustum”). The latter is a true tragic hero (his “Seven Trials” closely parallel the Labors of Hercules), and the stories in which he is central achieve thrilling intensity and resonance.
One (many, actually) of the world’s great stories, in immensely attractive and reader-friendly form. Essential reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03485-1
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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