Proust himself seldom did it better. A small but substantial masterpiece from one of the world’s greatest living writers.
The 1985 Nobelist joins Doris Lessing and Hortense Calisher in demonstrating, in this year of wonders, that old age need not inhibit creative power.
Simon, who is now 88, offers in this 2001 récit an enchanting Proustian reverie, assembled (as are his other 21 novels, such as The Palace, 1962, and The Flanders Road, 1960) from recurring images presented in swooping, dreamlike run-on sentences and emotion-laden stream-of-consciousness meditations. The starting point is a recollection of the trolley car that took the young narrator to and from school, and possessed his imagination as a virtually magical conveyance in which he was granted the occasional “privileged position” of standing in the vehicle’s cab alongside its driver. The logic of imagery then creates transitions to the beginning and ending points of the trolley line (a “garish” movie house and a popular “society beach”), thence to the narrator’s recent ordeal as an elderly man in a hospital ward, required to share space with a moribund, scarlet-pajama–clad roommate, on to memories of his beloved mother’s final days, backward to remembering her as the center of his childhood, which triggers further memories of the trolley, and so on. It’s a beautiful technique, which Simon has long since refined and perfected. This brief story is crammed with gorgeous word pictures (“the bulging pouch [of a fisherman’s net] in which a silvery mass of fish throbbed in chaotic desperation”; public monuments which appear to be “somehow emerging from the realm of the dead and conversing among themselves”) and sharply observed peripheral figures: a phlegmatic housemaid who burns captured rats alive in their traps; the narrator’s indomitable “Maman”; and that old man in the hospital, stubbornly, almost obscenely clinging to the vestiges of life.
Proust himself seldom did it better. A small but substantial masterpiece from one of the world’s greatest living writers.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-734-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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