Slow-moving and elaborate, by modern tastes: but a founding work of modern Portuguese literature, hailed by José Saramago as...
A 19th-century Portuguese epic is finally put into readable modern English, revealing a strange tale of decline and fall.
Eça (1845–1900) was a liberal in conservative Portugal, a litterateur who spent much of his adult life in willing exile as a minor diplomat in France, Cuba and England, “that land of heretics and…barbarous language,” as the materfamilias of the da Maia family has it. The da Maias are wealthy and influential, recognized throughout the country guided by a patriarch of enlightened sentiment who despises his son’s attachment to a woman who, he thunders, “is the daughter of a murderer and a slave-trader.” With that schism, the family weakens, until finally its foremost member is a dilettantish doctor, Carlos da Maia, who, with his scampish friend Ega, chases around the capital looking for various pleasures while philosophizing, drinking and amounting to not much of anything. The two flâneurs are fond of gossip, rivalries, even feuds, and of twitting the bourgeoisie and flouting convention with talk of the “so-called Christ” and a future without vegetables, “merely a remnant of man’s coarse animality.” Lisbon, alas, is a small pond even for such small fish. Carlos withdraws into a passionate relationship with a woman who has a daughter and has spent some time in the company of men for pay. As it develops, that is the least of the scandals surrounding her. The entanglements are worthy of Jane Austen, though much seamier, and they point toward the beginnings of the decadent apathy that would soon turn into totalitarianism. Think of it as a Portuguese Buddenbrooks, with a foretaste or two of Doctor Zhivago—save that where Pasternak’s novel ends with its doctor hero running away from a trolley, Eça’s has its doctor hero chasing after one.
Slow-moving and elaborate, by modern tastes: but a founding work of modern Portuguese literature, hailed by José Saramago as a masterwork.Pub Date: July 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1649-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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