An ingenious premise, developed with exemplary warmth and wit: a thoroughly captivating tale.
A clever autobiographical second US appearance from the Chilean-born author (Bad Vibes, 1997).
Narrator Beltran Soler, a 37-year-old seismologist, is preparing to fly from Los Angeles to a professional conference in Tokyo when a small earthquake hits. A conversation in flight with a beautiful fellow passenger plants in his busy mind memories of movies he had grown up with—and the bulk of the story offers fragmentary reminiscences of his family’s and his own experiences in Chile and southern California, connected to films that appeared during his childhood, in the late 1960s, through his 18th year. Some of the linkages are explicit: Dumbo expresses a fear of losing his mother (who is herself repeatedly victimized by her errant husband’s frequent absences from home); Oliver! parallels the Solers’ struggles to find a home; the figure of Huck Finn in Tom Sawyer inspires visions of leaving home and seizing independence. Even more poignantly, Close Encounters of the Third Kind imaginatively likens the derelictions of Beltran’s father Juan with that film’s protagonist—who “goes up to the mother ship, abandoning his wife and children to go off into outer space.” The heady lure of grade-B disaster films confirms Beltran’s fascination with quakes, and various G-rated films strike home, so to speak, provoking the realization that “nothing is as moving as a film about the value of family when one doesn’t have one of his own.” But the novel is more than lament, as other movie memories embody the Solers’ phlegmatic stoicism, as well as ruefully funny universal experiences of adolescent mood swings and the discoveries of sex and first love.
An ingenious premise, developed with exemplary warmth and wit: a thoroughly captivating tale.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053462-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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