Though genre purists will find Zeh's (Eagles and Angels, 2003) bold use of coincidence nothing short of monstrous, readers...
A scholarly dispute over the nature of the universe erupts in kidnapping and murder in this gripping, high-toned philosophical thriller.
Ever since they were in school together, studying physics under the tutelage of the improbably nicknamed Little Red Riding Hood, Sebastian and Oskar have held fundamentally different views of the world. Oskar, now a big-shot physicist in Geneva who preaches the single-answer theory that holds that things are as they are and not otherwise, is chasing the Nobel Prize through his labors to unite quantum physics with the general theory of relativity. Sebastian, an experimental nanotechnologist at the University of Freiburg, is a proponent of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in which the Big Bang engendered countless parallel universes where things can both be and not be the case at the same time. When Sebastian married Maike, an artists' agent and gallery owner, Oskar made no secret of his verdict that Sebastian was settling for a consolation prize. Now that their son Liam is ten years old, he sneers that everything on earth that matters to Sebastian bears his surname. The day after Sebastian accepts Oskar's challenge to debate their positions on a live TV program broadcast from Mainz, he's driving Liam to camp when his car disappears with his sleeping son inside. By the time the empty car is returned, Sebastian has received a ransom demand that names a horrific price. Even after he complies with the kidnappers' demand and feels that the catastrophe has passed, his life enters a precipitous free fall that tangles his fate with that of dour murder-squad detective Rita Skura and her old mentor, Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf, who's teetering on the edge of death and love.
Though genre purists will find Zeh's (Eagles and Angels, 2003) bold use of coincidence nothing short of monstrous, readers who can surrender to her radical rewriting of the rules of detective fiction and the physical universe will find it revelatory.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52642-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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