Like Heart of Darkness, with which similarities abound, this narrative is both tragic and traumatic.
The title alludes to the brutal exploitation of rubber-tappers in the early-20th-century Congo, for Capt. Lalande Biran of the Belgian Force Publique has promised his Parisian wife seven houses with the proceeds of his licit and illicit dealings.
Biran is one of many merciless Belgians in the service of King Leopold in 1903, yet in some ways he’s the most urbane of them all, for he’s a poet and a cultivated man of letters. Every week, however, he has his orderly Donatien procure him a native girl—and she must be a virgin owing to his fear of contracting a disease. (Biran’s usual habit is to give the girl to Donatien after his carnal desires are sated.) Second-in-command is Lt. Richard Van Thiegel, who keeps a list of amorous encounters by the race of the girl he exploits. When Van Thiegel finds a picture of the captain’s ravishing wife, he decides to make her number 200 on his list once he leaves the service. Introduced into this morass of corruption is Chrysostome Liège, a new soldier in the Force Publique, and one who doesn’t fit the mold. He’s a crack shot, is devoted to the Virgin Mary and doesn’t seem to have an interest in the native girls, a fact that Van Thiegel begins to exploit by referring contemptuously to Chrysostome as a “poofter.” Biran tries to speed up his ability to acquire his seven houses and is able to when the price of ivory and mahogany, both of which he illegally harvests, soars. Meanwhile, as a public relations gesture, Leopold is sending a statue of the Virgin Mary to the Congo, and the soldiers must prepare an adequate welcome.
Like Heart of Darkness, with which similarities abound, this narrative is both tragic and traumatic.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55597-623-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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