Eccentric, elusive and at times explosively funny. A lucid allegorical gem.
If Eugène Ionesco had written Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” he might have produced something very like this terse, teasing novel
It follows into English translation the veteran French author’s My Big Apartment (winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis) and A Cleaning Woman (the source of a recent film). It features an unnamed narrator about whom we know initially only that he suffers from a perpetual cold, which isn’t disabling, but does complicate his relationships with women: notably Laure, with whom he lives, and who’s accompanying him on a trip to the home of the narrator’s old friend Philippe to help celebrate the latter’s 50th birthday. In a subversively neutral voice, the narrator recounts how Laure takes ill, remains in the hotel where they had stopped en route and later returns home—as the narrator, resigned to attending Philippe’s party alone, hitches a ride with an amicable stranger (Gilles); is befriended by the latter and his wife and invited to Gilles’s birthday party (surely an innocent coincidence); meets a woman (Florence) who casually seduces him, then drives him to the threshold of his original destination—which can be reached only by boat. What he discovers in Philippe’s house, and during a subsequent visit to a nearby hospital, confirms the narrator’s paradoxical certainty that “Everything had happened just as I had decided it would.” Indeed. The book sneaks up on the reader skillfully, portraying its narrator as an introverted worrywart who first finds ominous resonance in offhand statements and quotidian occurrences (exactly as in a Ionesco play, incidentally), then gradually accepts that the “party” from which circumstance seemed determined to keep him is in fact an occasion of the utmost—and ultimate—personal significance to him.
Eccentric, elusive and at times explosively funny. A lucid allegorical gem.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-265-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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