So comfortable has Drabble become with the baggy formula for her our-gang novels (The Radiant Way, Natural Curiosity) that here she even appends a bibliography, a list of actual books that her character, as well as their creator, might have read to negotiate the present work's concerns. Liz Headland, the London psychiatrist of the earlier two novels, has received in the mail a package from the Far East. It's from Stephen Cox, the novelist—and apart from jottings and stray drafts, it contains a human finger bone. Cox, intrigued by the fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge, has made his way to Thailand, then Vietnam, and hopes to go further into Pol Pot's former heart of darkness. Back in London, Liz sifts through the fragments hoping to find a weave—and when she doesn't, she feels she must herself find Cox, from whom no one's heard anything for a long time. Her search dovetails through near-disaster (toxic-shock syndrome in a Bangkok hotel) with what she discovers has been Stephen's demise by illness deep in the Cambodian jungle. Drabble, ever the schematicist, jumps blithely from Liz's London overcivilization to Stephen's dread-filled voyage into primitive evil, scattering contrasts as she goes. Paradoxically, what saves the book from the triviality of its predecessors is this moving-finger-of-fate approach. Here, it mostly works. Attitudes are overarched by pity and terror; individual lives seem movingly fragile against the forces of chaos. Still, Drabble's global, sampling manner is frustrating. In sections about the Far East here, she writes as a novelist— particular, definitive, surprising. Most everywhere else, she is at the lower flame of the journalist/littÇrateur, telling us what we know already.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84270-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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