Sensitive proof that understanding lies as much in the details as in the broad strokes.
Again, Desai explores cultural fault lines as she describes a young American’s experiences in Mexico.
Strongly evoking a distant time and place—Mexico in the early 1900s—Desai (stories: Diamond Dust, 2000, etc.) introduces protagonist Eric, a historian who has lost faith in academics because he prefers detail to generalities. He’s been living with Em in Boston, where she pursues her medical studies with single-minded determination, and when Em announces she must visit Mexico to do research, Eric decides to go along too. Once there, Em has her own agenda, and when Eric, left on his own in Mexico City, by chance hears aging ethnographer Dona Vera talk about her work with Huichol Indians, he recognizes some of the places she mentions: they’re the places his Cornish grandfather described when he told young Eric about his experiences mining silver in Mexico, where Eric’s father was born in the midst of Pancho Villa and Zapata’s revolution. Eric, who like his father has never quite fit in—both men are imaginative and solitary—next travels to the remote region in the Sierra where silver was once mined, and, after one night at Dona Vera’s hacienda in the valley, takes a bus to the mountainside town. The former mining town is mostly abandoned, but with the Day of the Dead at hand, it fills up as visitors come to honor their dead. Between Eric’s arrival in the town and his search for his grandmother’s grave, Desai tells the story of how young Betty left Cornwall to marry Eric’s grandfather David, adjusted to life in a Mexican village, but died giving birth to Eric’s father. Eric, deeply affected, gives his vivid imagination free rein as a night in the cemetery becomes a transformative encounter with both the living and the dead.
Sensitive proof that understanding lies as much in the details as in the broad strokes.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-04215-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
