Likable and harmless: science Nora-Ephronized into generic romance.
A plain, unmarried New York City woman’s affections vacillate between the poles of hard science and pop culture—in the first fiction from a translator daughter of John McPhee.
Narrator Marie Brown, 39, is a semiambitious tabloid obit writer obsessed with B-movie diva Nora Mars. When Mars slips into a coma, Marie jumps on the story, beginning her investigation with the star’s third ex-husband, Rex. She develops a crush on this lounge lizard, and a professional dilemma ensues: Go for the lover or the story? Marie is also a lapsed graduate student whose lingering passion for the philosophy of science interferes with her work. Boning up on relativity, physics, and quantum theory at the library, she meets Marco Trentadue, a pajama-wearing bibliophile with informed ideas on subjects dear to Marie’s mind. Their discussions of scientific theory shed light on (and provide analogies for) Marie’s ongoing investigation, which takes her into some dark and mysterious places in Nora Mars’s past. Nora’s estranged sister, Maud, offers insights that conflict significantly with Rex’s version of events. The story caroms between investigative leads and library chats that resonate in Marie’s head. Marco, we learn, is a WIMP (a “weakly interacting massive particle”), while Rex is a MACHO (a “massive compact halo object”). The subjectivity of biographical “truth” is linked to the theory of relativity. Interwoven into each section of Marie’s investigation are lines from movies—some real, some imagined—invoking Nora’s film- and “real-life” wit. These dialogue snippets often provide clever counterpoint to the scientific aphorisms that form the chapters’ epigraphs, but the use of science to comment on romance is a bright idea undermined by the author’s regrettable tendency toward cuteness.
Likable and harmless: science Nora-Ephronized into generic romance.Pub Date: July 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50077-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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