In these novellas, people never really know each other, which means they must take their consolations where they can.
These two novellas present an edgy evocation of contemporary life.
Nors is a creator of small spaces; her fiction is relentless, edgy, brief. The Danish writer’s collection Karate Chop (2014) gathered 15 stories in 88 pages: work marked by sudden turns through which characters must come to grips with the unexamined assumptions of their lives. Nors aspires to something similar with her new book, which brings together a pair of novellas, although we may as well call them extended prose poems. In the first, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, she uses short declarative sentences—each framed as a single paragraph—to tell the story of a composer who desires nothing more than a kind of lasting silence, while the second, Days, comes framed as a succession of lists. The idea is to deconstruct, or rewire, narrative by stripping away excess detail in favor of something closer to pure consciousness. Yet lest this sound off-putting or difficult, it couldn’t be more accessible. The key is Nors’ specificity, which roots us in the lives she reveals. “Minna walks around among ordinary people,” she writes. "Ordinary people cheat on their taxes. / Ordinary people go to swinger clubs. / Ordinary people flee the scene of the crime." What Nors is after is the peculiar anomie of contemporary living, in which despite being constantly in touch with one another, we have never been further apart. As a consequence, we are often disconnected, separated by distances that seem impossible to bridge. All that's left to us are the smallest details, which become the lens through which we reckon with ourselves. “1. Woke an hour early,” explains the narrator of Days. “2. made instant coffee, / 3. drank it, / 4. stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fanø and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I’d wondered / 5. and couldn’t have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing.”
In these novellas, people never really know each other, which means they must take their consolations where they can.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-742-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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