An exceptionally engaging US debut, and first novel, from the Chilean Fuguet (who's published another novel and a story collection in his native land) just might signal a new stage in Latin fiction: a post-boom natural realism that finds North American precedent not in Faulkner (the hero of Garc°a M†rquez et al.) but in Salinger. If Fuguet's self-absorbed young narrator, Matias Vicunas, was really as bored and pathetic as he claims, his narrative wouldn't be the delightfully garrulous adventure in self-discovery it is. Seventeen and alienated, Matias is pissed off and antisocial, a true rebel without a clue. So he indulges in the best illicit stuff he can: sex, drugs, and (bad) rock-and-roll. Among Chile's ``golden children''—the privileged kids of the conservative ruling class- -Matias seems hellbent on trouble. Unlike his friends, he's uninterested in nurturing a career, and he finds no comfort in politics, as his disaffected elders once did. In fact, Fuguet smartly allows Matias's one sympathetic teacher—a sexy lit prof— to reveal herself as a political clichÇ and a rabid left-wing anti- Semite. Which is particularly important because Matias begins to take pride in his family's great secret: his mother's Jewish ancestors. Disgusted by the affected Catholicism of her family, Matias is equally grossed-out by his handsome father and his swinging social set of hypocrites who reserve vice only for their own class, though a father and son debauch (with good coke and expensive hookers) does bring them closer. Like Holden Caufield, with whom he identifies, Matias craves ``innocence,'' since he's ``not that complicated. Really.'' The time-warping soundtrack, the slangy translation, and the cool pop references help affirm Fuguet's sense of 1980s Chile as America in the '50s. Here is what the new economic prosperity engenders culturally, he implies, and thank goodness we have such a clever novelist to guide us.
Pub Date: April 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15059-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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