“What was there between them,” Fuentes’s narrator asks, “that thwarted the continuation of what had been and prevented the...
The power of music, and the passions aroused by the artistic impulse, are given inexplicably murky expression in this very odd, somewhat disappointing latest from Fuentes (The Years with Laura Díaz, 2000, etc.).
The first of two juxtaposed narratives (and, thankfully, the longer) charts the turbulent relationship between French symphony conductor Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara and Mexican diva “Inez Prada” (née Inés Rosenzweig), who first meet when she blithely disrupts his preparations for a London appearance. Over the years, they collaborate as “lovers with a dual dynamic in bed and onstage,” but remain essentially apart, she drifting in and out of love and marriage, he dancing to the tunes composed by memories of a lost “brother companion” (his physical and temperamental opposite) and the horrors of the Holocaust, which he schemes to incorporate into performances of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. Whenever Gabriel and Inez meet, there are sure to be portentous observations about the nature and meaning of music, art, and love—but these are David Mamet–like nuggets of colloquialism compared with the parallel story of “the first” man and woman on earth, a morbidly ingenuous pair of cavedwellers and deer hunters whose musings sound like a Jean Auel potboiler entrusted to the editorship of C.P. Snow. There is the seed of a compelling story here, in the perspective of the 93-year-old maestro looking backward on a life defined by artistic and personal strategies and compromises—but, for whatever reason, Fuentes didn’t write that novel.
“What was there between them,” Fuentes’s narrator asks, “that thwarted the continuation of what had been and prevented the occurrence of what never was?” If that makes sense to you, you’ll probably enjoy Inez.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-17553-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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