Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra’s fragments are consistently witty and provocative. A-minus.
True or false: can effective fiction be written in the format of a standardized test?
Answer: pretty much, and few are as equipped to do it as well as Chilean writer Zambra (My Documents, 2015, etc.), who has a penchant for experimentation. The book is broken up into 90 questions across five sections. At first those questions are largely ironic or comic in simplistic ways. For instance, the reader is asked to name the word that has no relation to “bear”: “endure,” “tolerate,” “abide,” “panda,” or “kangaroo.” But as the test focuses on completing, ordering, and eliminating sentences, it’s clear Zambra is aiming for more sophisticated and poignant effects. The questions become flash-fiction tales about transition points like lost loves, the discovery of a tumor, and a grandfather’s death, and the multiple-choice answers suggest that how we respond to a story depends heavily on where the writer places the narrative stress and what’s omitted or added. (For instance, a first-person story about the successes and failures of his children prompts the reader to rethink the story if lines about grandchildren and planned pregnancies are removed.) This reaches a kind of climax in the “reading comprehension” section, made up of three brief stories about a scheming pair of twins and couples that have split up. The follow-up questions tend to highlight the absurdity of pat answers to works of fiction. (“What is the worst title for this story—the one that would reach the widest possible audience?”) Even so, Zambra can sometimes insistently point to a “correct” answer: for a question in the story about school’s influence, the only option is: “You weren’t educated; you were trained.”
Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra’s fragments are consistently witty and provocative. A-minus.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-310919-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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