Sensitive, observant, unrelenting—and compelling.
Romanian-born Müller (The Land of Green Plums, 1996, etc.) now lives in Berlin, having successfully fled after running afoul of the Ceausescu regime. Here, she offers a grim portrait of totalitarian life’s squalor and pain.
A young woman has been “summoned” to appear “at ten sharp” before the greasy Major Albu for another of several interrogations—sessions that can be cruel physically and are always so emotionally. The reason? The young woman, it seems, working at the time (she’s now been fired) in a factory that makes clothing for export, tucked notes—saying “marry me”—into the pockets of a number of pairs of pants destined for Italy. She would rather live in Italy? She doesn’t believe in her own country? She wouldn’t have been summoned at all if she’d agreed to keep sleeping with her despicable boss Nelu—who, upon rejection, trumped up tales of pants-pocket notes to France and Sweden also. To top it off, now the man she’s living with, Paul, has been run off the road on his motorcycle, and his side-business of making TV aerials (so people can tune in Bulgaria) has been trashed and he’s been fired from his factory job. On top of the gratuitous and frightening harassment, there’s the rundown squalor of life—a row of dusty glass eyes in a pharmacy window, an apartment building called “the leaning tower” because it isn’t built straight, much drunkenness, empty lots, shabby trams with no “fixed schedule.” And there’s the past: a first husband who out of weakness almost kills his young wife; the promiscuous best friend Lili, who, trying to flee the country, is attacked—and devoured—by dogs; grandparents sent to the camps while their land was expropriated; a sadistic father-in-law who in earlier years, as “the Perfumed Commissar,” was in charge of local expropriations. Says the young woman, on her way to Major Albu (the whole novel is “told” during one tram ride), “The trick is not to go crazy.”
Sensitive, observant, unrelenting—and compelling.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6012-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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