Delightful nonsense that will lift a lot of spirits.
The hero (of sorts) has aged a year in this wildly implausible sequel to The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared (2012).
Reaching age 101 hasn’t slowed Allan Karlsson, who travels from continent to continent with his thieving friend, Julius Jonsson. A hot air balloon becomes untethered in Indonesia, and the gentlemen are soon afloat in the Indian Ocean. A North Korean bulk carrier rescues them on its way to pick up four illicit kilos of enriched uranium in Madagascar. The ship’s captain takes them back to North Korea, where they meet Kim Jong-un and convince him that Allan is a nuclear weapons expert who invented “hetisostat pressure” and that Julius is an asparagus expert. Allan gives a North Korean engineer a formula for vitamin C and smelling salts, or possibly toothpaste and bleach. When Kim kicks the Swedes out of the country, Allan picks up a briefcase with the uranium in it—easy to do, since all North Korean briefcases look alike. Allan considers giving the uranium to Donald Trump until they meet and Allan decides that the U.S. president is “awfully close to exploding all on his own” and “should be diagnosed with something.” Then he writes a letter on three napkins to Angela Merkel, who comes across as the sanest person in the book. Early on, Allan obtains a “black tablet” that shows news, music, and naked ladies. Thus he learns more than Trump, who learns all that’s worth knowing from Fox. Allan and Julius meet a grocer/coffin-maker and help her sell designer coffins at a travel and tourism trade fair. Allan discovers Twitter and Facebook, Julius plants asparagus with an assist from Merkel, and a bad guy in Africa learns the hard way what lions like to eat.
Delightful nonsense that will lift a lot of spirits.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283855-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
