Diverting but minor early work from a major novelist.
A breezy, comic novel about New-Age pretensions by an author who has since become renowned for more substantial fiction.
Before he received international acclaim with his autobiographical series of Patrick Melrose novels (Mother’s Milk, 2005, etc.)—dark, scathingly funny eviscerations of the British upper class—St. Aubyn seemed like a more conventionally comic novelist in this 1998 work, which is receiving belated American publication. It’s an engaging satire about people trying to achieve some higher cosmic consciousness while distracted by mundane affairs such as sex and money. “What else was there to do with sex and money except have misunderstandings about them?” says an heiress supporting a writer who doesn’t seem to be writing. The most fully fleshed and sympathetic male character, the closest one to a protagonist, is a British banker named Peter, who is even more disillusioned with the course of his life after falling into rapturous lust with and subsequently being forsaken by the libertine Sabine. He doesn’t even know her last name, but in this novel it seems that all roads lead to the spiritual Big Sur retreat of Esalen, where Peter falls into a deeply cosmic love with another woman while searching for clues to Sabine and where a dozen or so other characters converge for a tantric workshop that plays out like a British sex farce. The plot involves preop transsexuals, impotence, rock-star aspirations, a campaign to save the whales from AIDS, the potential for group sex with the elderly, and the smugly condescending “anti-guru guru” Adam and his partner, Yves. (Get it?) Much of the New-Age and Esalen context might have seemed dated even when written in the late 1990s, but the novel is really a romantic comedy at heart: “Everybody knew that being ‘in love’ was a state of temporary insanity, that’s why it was so important to make it last as long as possible.”
Diverting but minor early work from a major novelist.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04601-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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