In this sequel to My Name is Asher Lev (1972), the author of The Chosen (1967) and Davita's Harp (1985)—as well as other fictional probes of the rich complexities of Jewish Orthodoxy—brings his protagonist artist back to the Hasidic community in Brooklyn from France. Asher had been "banished" 20 years before, and now once again he must exist between two apparently exclusive worlds: there is the sacred "world of Torah," and there is also the secular, solitary, and visionary world of the artist. Renowned painter Asher Lev, his wife Devorah (still psychically a captive of a Holocaust-crippled childhood), and a young son and daughter are in Brooklyn to participate in the mourning period for a revered uncle. Asher's father—the 89-year-old Rebbe, prime deputy for the leader of the Ladover Hasidic community—and Asher's mother are no nearer than ever to understanding Asher's deliberate turn to the "pagan" world of art. (Yet in the deceased uncle's study Asher finds a stunning collection of secular art and, from the uncle's fine and courageous mind, a gift of faith.) Through the days and nights—in the heart of the Ladovers in the States and in France—with the warm love of family, the pulsing of ritual loyalties and taboos, ripples of terror (as old fears and hatreds surface), Asher finds his "nerve ends still connected" to the community. Then, pressed between sacred and profane worlds, Asher joins in a dialectic with the riddling shades of such as Picasso, a famous sculptor, his dead uncle—and the Rebbe, both in his tiny person, or on the phone, and, at the close, after a miracle journey "in a single stride," in France. Just as magical—and disturbing—is the appearance in Asher's work of his little son's face, in the Sacrifice of Isaac. At the end, there is a linkage of worlds in a kind of redemptive sacrificial act in the gift of a son. Potok's style stiffens periodically into clumps of clichÉd settings ("in the distance a dog barked") or pokey dialogue. But, then again, there is that restless, eager journeying in the dark—and then the sudden shimmerings of possibility—in odysseys of the soul that gives Potok's spiritually searching novels their saving strength.
Pub Date: May 11, 1990
ISBN: 0449001156
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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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