Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In...
A tale of equivocal heroes, treacherous revolutionaries, and rejected love as an intellectual struggles to learn the truth about his family.
Bolivian author Paz Soldán, currently teaching at Cornell, evokes a gritty urban milieu permeated by pop culture and technology as he tells the story of thirtysomething Pedro Zabalgo. An assistant professor with a Berkeley Ph.D., Pedro is teaching courses in Latin American politics at the University of Madison in upstate New York, where he has met and fallen in love with graduate student Ashley. In alternate chapters, Pedro recalls how he met Ashley, how they fell in love, and how their affair developed. Now on sabbatical in Rio Fugitivo, Bolivia, Pedro is trying to find out the truth about his father, Pedro Reissig, who was a revolutionary hero of the 1970s, as well as author of the cult novel Berkeley, which, with cryptic references and ambiguous protagonists, evokes the turbulent years he spent studying, like his son, at Berkeley. Before he left Madison, Pedro broke up with—but can’t forget—Ashley, who subsequently has married another man. Memories of her, and uncertainties about the circumstances of his father’s death, preoccupy him, and he finds it difficult to begin his search. His father, whose body was never found, was believed to have been betrayed by a colleague who led the government soldiers to their meeting place. As he pores over Berkeley for insights into his father, and advises a druglord on his memoirs, there are mysterious bombings in the city. Pedro also hears conflicting stories about his father and begins to suspect his uncle David, a noted setter of cryptic puzzles and the only conspirator to have survived, of being responsible for the old man’s death.
Pedro, like all overly cerebral protagonists, thinks more than he acts, and when he does act, he often gets it wrong. In all: more craft than art.Pub Date: April 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-39557-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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