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ANTAGONY BOOK ONE

The story is long but engaging as the novel morphs into a memorial to a humanist civilization under siege, its icons not...

Sprawling bildungsroman—itself the first installment of a much larger tetralogy—of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath in Catalonia by Barcelona-born novelist Goytisolo.

The somewhat less-well-known brother of the revered modernist Juan Goytisolo, the present author seems to have undertaken the project of creating a Catalan version of Ulysses, save that his story plays out over years rather than a single Dublin day. His is the Barcelona of delicious fish dishes and the Sagrada Familia basilica, of street vendors and intellectual cafes. His Catalonia is also a place of great violence. The novel opens as “little Moors” bustle to the front lines and fascists shave the heads of Communist girls in ugly retribution. In this milieu, a boy named Raúl Ferrer Gaminde does his best to retain the naïve innocence of childhood even as “the kids in town found a dead soldier, floating in a quiet bend of the river, all tangled up in the brambles under the water,” and so badly decomposed that no one could tell what side he was on. Raúl grows up shy and a bit reflexive in a countryside household, among casks of wine and voluble, colorful relatives, but then comes the time for him to leave for the city, long since an outpost of Francoist Spain, a place of drag queens and flamenco dancers, of smoky bars and parading soldiers, and there he becomes not just a quietly bookish intellectual, but also a Communist and, worse still, a writer. Goytisolo serves up pagelong paragraphs filled with enthusiasm and rich detail; the translation ably captures the fluidity of his prose, though it seems at times to wander in the no-man’s land between British and American English (as when a pompous lieutenant is described with a certain naughty c-word).

The story is long but engaging as the novel morphs into a memorial to a humanist civilization under siege, its icons not just Joyce, but also other modernists such as Proust and Hermann Broch. It holds up just fine in such company.

Pub Date: March 23, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-62897-172-9

Page Count: 760

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

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THINGS FALL APART

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

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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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