A wearying, headache-inducing exercise in “literary” mystery.
Specters from the Spanish Civil War and the ghost of tragic love haunt the latest from award-winning Molina (In Her Absence, 2007, etc.).
In the waning days of Franco’s dictatorship, the police seek a young man named Minaya because of his involvement in student protests. He needs to leave Madrid but has nowhere to go. A chance encounter with a scholar studying the Republican poet Jacinto Solana reminds Minaya of his uncle Manuel, who was friends with the writer. He writes to the old man, claiming he is working on a thesis about Solana, and asks if he can pay a visit to conduct research. Manuel invites Minaya to his home in the small town of Mágina. His uncle’s mansion is a shrine to the beautiful Mariana, the young man discovers; every room contains pictures and mementos of the woman who died—shot in the head—on the night of their marriage. Solana was in love with Mariana too, Minaya discovers, and as he searches for the poet’s missing masterpiece, he uncovers a crime. This synopsis in no way captures the experience of following—or rather, trying to follow—the plot. Molina’s narrative traces a dizzyingly elliptical trajectory, moving backwards and forwards in time and shifting perspective so abruptly that it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to determine the antecedent to which a pronoun refers. A lost manuscript, a love triangle, the suggestion of murder: These tantalizing elements create a dynamic tension that the novel’s punishingly slow pace cannot sustain. Molina is a stylish and much-lauded writer, but the artistry that makes works like Sepharad (2003) so rich and compelling in this case overwhelms the story. The author demands a lot from his readers, and many of them may find the rewards not worth the effort.
A wearying, headache-inducing exercise in “literary” mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101410-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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