A likable novel marked by a profundity of feeling.
In this debut novel from short-story writer Attenberg (Instant Love, 2006), widow-in-waiting Jarvis Miller guides readers through underworlds of sickness, fear and grieving.
The book is set in the modern-day Manhattan art world. Artist Martin Miller is painting atop a ladder when an aneurysm detonates in his brain and plunges him into a six-year coma. Martin leaves behind 325 works, and his agent contemplates a MoMA retrospective. Said agent, by the way, delivers some of Attenberg’s sharpest humor, as when she bitches about her earth-motherish assistant: “…she’s a little too, I don’t know, vagina for my tastes.” Having reluctantly become the Ethel Kennedy of the demimonde, Jarvis attends pity parties thrown by Martin’s rivals—they envy the authenticity of her suffering—and misses her spouse. Deliverance—or at least distraction—arrives at the laundromat, where Jarvis bumps into a troika of affable hunks: a novelist wannabe, an actor and a sweet young dad. The troupe tours coffee bars and hipster haunts, and affection and heartbreak ensue. But it’s less the story than the characters and scenes that captivate. Attenberg gets gallery-land down cold; she also writes of longing and mourning with extraordinary heart. She muses on the Big Questions—euthanasia, faith, mortality—while taking time out to incorporate savagely funny lines: “Judith was a cokehead, as well as a diabetic, a brilliant combination of death wish and death sentence.”
A likable novel marked by a profundity of feeling.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-952-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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