A blend of psychology and social commentary: not to everyone’s taste, perhaps, but those who appreciate its central...
Drabble’s 14th novel (The Witch of Exmoor, 1997, etc.), firmly rooted as always in the English class system and the trials of her intelligent, attractive heroines, but more notable for its unusually bleak portrait of an angry, unhappy woman the author freely admits is based on her own mother.
Bessie Bawtry, born into the South Yorkshire working class in the early 20th century, is smart enough to get a scholarship to Cambridge but too neurotic to withstand the university’s social and academic pressures. She’s beset by illnesses (her depressive response to every challenge), barely manages to graduate, and winds up back in her despised hometown. She marries local boy Joe Barron, whose success as a lawyer can’t assuage Bessie’s permanent sense of grievance. She inspires a mix of pity and rage in her daughter, Chrissie, who runs wild in her teens and barely survives a crash-and-burn first marriage to settle down with a kind, aristocratic fellow archeologist as her second husband. Bessie is some years dead when the story opens with a present-day conference, about mitochondrial DNA and matrilineal descent, attended by Chrissie’s daughter, science journalist Faro Gaulden. Moving smoothly back and forth in time, guiding readers with the direct authorial address so common in Victorian novels, Drabble considers Bessie’s painful impact on Chrissie and the matriarchal heritage’s more indirect consequences for Faro. Like the peppered moth, which survived 19th-century industrial pollution by evolving darker wings, Drabble’s characters are the products of both their environment and the choices they have made in response to it. Chrissie and Faro are goodhearted, fallible but not overly self-destructive protagonists of an appealing sort familiar from such previous novels as Jerusalem the Golden (1985); pinched, tormented, and tormenting Bessie is a darker, in many ways more interesting, figure about whom the author clearly still has strong unresolved feelings.
A blend of psychology and social commentary: not to everyone’s taste, perhaps, but those who appreciate its central importance in the evolution of English fiction will find Drabble a thoughtful modern practitioner of this approach.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100521-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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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