Weldon's kicking up her heels again, and raising great, intoxicating clouds of dust, in this delectable new novel written all around the theme of infidelity. Or perhaps the theme's just sex—which, when it occurs extramaritally, can't be gainsaid or stopped: it's just the ``Life Force...leaping...like electricity, from this one to that one, burning us up, wearing us out, making us old, passing on, its only purpose its own survival...the best thing that ever happened to us.'' Here, the ``Life Force'' is embodied by an ambitious London developer, Leslie Beck, he ``of the active penis,'' which is on record as being ``exactly one-seventh his height'' (and he is not that short). In the 70's, it seems, a bevy of yuppie housewives danced to his tune, including: the lonely mountain-climber's wife Rosalie (whose husband walked into the hills one day and never returned); her friend Nora; Nora's erstwhile friend Susan (whom Nora caught in a clutch with her very own husband, ergo the erstwhile); and Marion, who, together with Leslie, sold the baby they made to a nice couple from Johannesburg, and then opened an art gallery with the spoils. Twenty years after foxy Leslie has had his day in the chicken coop, he reappears, a 60-year-old widower, to make things happen in the lives of all these women again. The results are perfect Weldon off-the-wall: arson set by Nora since her husband's finally left her; the surprise appearance of Leslie and Marion's South African son; and the return of Rosalie's mountaineering Ulysses, who shows up just in time to save Rosalie from being electrocuted in the bathtub by a mass murderer beau. Who cares if the voice occasionally sounds a little treacly as it addresses its ``dear reader.'' The rest is great fun: Virginia Woolf with a pineapple on her head and no problem with sex at all.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84146-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
IN THE NEWS
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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