This isn’t your typical fictionalized life of a writer—instead, it’s an unexpected meditation on the convergence of two...
This lyrical novel reimagines Herman Melville’s life and adds a hauntingly atmospheric spin.
There are many novels that have fictionalized the lives of notable writers. In the case of this 1941 book—now appearing in English for the first time—the overlap between author and subject runs deeper than most. Giono is known for his French translation, with Lucien Jacques, of Moby-Dick. This novel was originally intended as the preface for that larger work but quickly became its own distinct entity. Edmund White's introduction helpfully contextualizes this novel within Giono’s larger body of work and also provides a useful guide to the areas in which Giono’s version of Melville veers away from the historical record. “Giono was the one with the big personality, and the character, 'Melville,' is his alter ego," White writes. The novel opens as Melville returns to the United States in 1849 after a trip to England; he has "a strange item in his baggage. It was an embalmed head…but it was his own.” This metaphorically rich image leads into the story of his time overseas, placing this most American of writers in a foreign land. While traveling, he meets a woman named Adelina White; their heated discussions of politics and philosophy leave him infatuated with her and inspired to write the book that would become his masterpiece. Giono juxtaposes lyrically written paragraphs about Melville’s travels with passages in which intense voices of various characters overwhelm the narrative—a sort of literary echo of the juxtapositions that abound in Moby-Dick. A different evocation of that novel comes in a scene where Adelina pragmatically lambasts those who avoid helping the hungry for “philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo.”
This isn’t your typical fictionalized life of a writer—instead, it’s an unexpected meditation on the convergence of two literary lives.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-137-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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