The lack of narrative drive may irk some readers, but those who appreciate her able combination of intelligence, wit, and...
From veteran novelist Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby, 2013, etc.), a meditation on modern old age spiked with astringent humor on a subject “too serious for tears.”
Fran Stubbs, “well turned seventy,” works for a charitable trust to create better housing for the elderly, but she herself lives in a shabby, poorly maintained North London apartment building for the sake of the garage and the view. She’s not ready to move into expensive exurban retirement like her friend Josephine, and she’s relieved not to be housebound like her terminally ill former husband, Claude. Yet Fran is wryly conscious of her fading memory and increasing scattiness as she bustles around to conferences, brings ready-to-reheat meals over to Claude (with whom she’s resumed friendly relations a half-century after their divorce), and lets Josephine talk her into seeing a production of Happy Days. These typically self-aware Drabble women agree that Samuel Beckett could have spared himself all that angst about impending death when he was in his 20s and 30s: “There’s time for that later, plenty of time.” Mortality is much closer at hand for Bennett, an elderly historian living in the Canary Islands, and his considerably younger but now middle-aged lover, Ivor. “Who will push [my] wheelchair?” Ivor wonders, fearful that he will be alone and destitute once the man he has tended for so long dies. The link between these two storylines is Fran’s hard-drinking son, Christopher, a television arts presenter who has a professional connection with Bennett, and numerous other vividly drawn characters swarm in a text notable for Drabble’s customarily sharp social observations and willingness to let her plot amble where it will. The final destination of several key figures should come as no surprise, given their age, but the author evokes a palpable sense of sorrow and loss nonetheless.
The lack of narrative drive may irk some readers, but those who appreciate her able combination of intelligence, wit, and rue will willingly follow Drabble into the sunset.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-13495-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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