Another astonishingly beautiful story from Makine (Once Upon the River Love, 1998), this one unutterably sad, plumbing the depths of an ÇmigrÇ Russian mother’s despair at the course of her son’s sexual awakening during the bitter postwar winter of 1946 in rural France. Fittingly enough, Princess Arbyelina’s tragedy is related over the course of a long night by the gatekeeper at the cemetery where she’s buried. He starts by describing a summer scene of two wet bodies on a riverbank: one, Olga’s, alive but clothed in tatters and unmoving; the other, a corpulent, suited ex-Russian officer, freshly dead. How they came to be there involves the previous winter, the worst in a century, and the ÇmigrÇ community settled in an abandoned brewery nearby. Olga, a refugee battered in her flight from the Bolsheviks and abandoned by her husband in Paris, arrived with her young son shortly before the war began, keeping largely to herself while running the community library. By 1946, she has a poet-lover in Paris who no longer excites her and a restless, brooding teenager whose youth has been transmuted through the crucible of hemophilia. With the onset of winter, Olga begins sleeping in a strange, leaden manner, which she slowly realizes is the result of her son drugging her nightly tea. This discovery leads to another even more unthinkable, and as she grapples with a knowledge that she can share with no one, she finds herself unable to alter what’s going on. An end comes to it, finally—in the shape of a corpse on a riverbank—though for Olga that end brings the loss of what little grip on reality she has left. As chilling and finely charted a descent into madness as has ever been imagined, with many extraordinary moments along the way: all imbued with a wrenching combination of love and despair, fire and ice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-494-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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