Atxaga has taken in a lot about the peculiarities of desert living, but he’s only half-heartedly attempted to deliver a...
A Basque novelist takes a detour in Reno and contemplates his Spanish heritage alongside the American desert landscape.
This semiautobiographical novel by Atxaga (Seven Houses in France, 2011) opens with a writer not unlike Atxaga himself arriving with his wife and two daughters for a stint as a writer-in-residence in Reno, a magnet for Basque migrants and home to a Basque studies department at the University of Nevada. Writing in the form of a diary interspersed with longer personal essays, the narrator offers some fish-out-of-water descriptions of life in America: his kids doing active-shooter drills in school, campaign visits from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the novel is set in 2007 and 2008), and (a particular fixation) the ignorance or blithe indifference of his neighbors to news about a serial rapist in the area. But nobody would confuse Atxaga for de Tocqueville, disinclined as he is to broad cultural analysis and prone as he is to digress. The story includes riffs on famous Basque figures like boxer Paulino Uzcudun, who trained in Nevada before a bout with Max Baer, the death of a mentally ill cousin, and a trip to Italy. From incident to incident, Atxaga’s storytelling can be engaging, shifting from highly detailed set pieces about funeral processions and typefaces to travelogues of road trips to San Francisco and through barren desert to dreamscapes (he depicts a particularly lively one involving a dumping ground for metaphors). But the novel overall is effectively plotless and hence static-feeling; despite Atxaga’s efforts to use the news stories about the rapist and disappeared adventurer Steve Fossett as a frame, the book mostly meanders.
Atxaga has taken in a lot about the peculiarities of desert living, but he’s only half-heartedly attempted to deliver a full-bodied work of fiction about it.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-810-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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