If you have to read it, better open a nice French red.
Vapid and pretentious tale of obsessive love.
French writer Oster, author of eight previous novels, debuts here with an enigmatic, largely pointless, deadpan, unsatisfying, and extremely self-important story. It begins with Jacques, a middle-aged corporate manager, in a kind of extended meditation as he takes stock of his life after the departure of his old girlfriend Constance. After six months of refusing to clean his apartment, he decides to hire a cleaner and calls Laura, whose handbill he had noticed, and engages her for two days a week. Laura is 25, rather sullen, and not terribly clean-looking to the fastidious Jacques, though he finds himself oddly intrigued. He begins to call his apartment when he knows she’s there, and later he arranges to be home while she cleans so he can watch her. Laura is polite but shows little warmth toward Jacques, so he is surprised when she suddenly asks him one day if she can move in with him. It’s a pragmatic arrangement (she’s broken up with her boyfriend and can’t afford a place of her own), but before long she and Jacques are sleeping together, and very quickly they—well, they don’t fall in love exactly, but they become very strongly dependent on each other. Jacques thinks about his new lover in considerable detail (“I focused on . . . Laura’s vagina at rest. Closed. But not too closed . . .”), and they even vacation together. But they’re not happy. Laura falls in love with a younger man, but she won’t leave Jacques without his permission. He thinks she should leave, though it’s not as if he has the right to give her permission. He discusses it with his depressed friend Claire, who can’t help him. There’s a kind of rescue at the end, but not a happy ending, exactly. It’s much more nuanced than that.
If you have to read it, better open a nice French red.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59051-039-9
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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