A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.
A fisherman confronts his life, loves, and mortality in this elliptical, somber novella.
The veteran Norwegian novelist Fosse (Aliss at the Fire, 2010, etc.) has a knack for compressing an entire lifetime into a few key moments in a few dozen pages. This book, echoing its title’s evocation of birth and death, opens with the birth of Johannes, an event described in run-on language that captures his father’s anxiety and mother’s exhaustion (“What a good strong boy Johannes yes and to stay in this stay here where nothing else Johannes will be a fisherman like his father”). The prose becomes less abstract in a longer second section that captures Johannes, who indeed became a fisherman, in his old age. But the mood is still unsettled in ways that suggest a ghost story: A widower, he steps out one morning contemplating his long life, seven children, and friendship with Peter, with whom he takes a portentous trip out into a nearby bay. Whether the instability has to do with Johannes' weakened state or something more metaphysical is a question Fosse leaves largely open to the reader; he weaves in mentions of superstitions and questions of God’s existence not so much to deliver direct comments on them but to suggest the ways our thinking flows uncertainly around them. Johannes’ recollections of a young girlfriend, [69] his late wife, [75] and caretaker daughter, Signe, are tender but unromantic—Fosse’s poetic prose implies that the things we love are just out of our grasps. (One paragraph is a riff on whether Signe actually sees him while approaching him.) [89] While Fosse’s writing is easy to admire—Johannes is beautifully depicted—it’s also easy to anticipate the grim place the story is moving toward.
A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-108-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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