A bad book from a good writer who needs a new subject.
A history of grievous family losses transforms a mild-mannered antiques dealer into a judgmental “fascist” (his daughter’s word) in British author Haig’s latest novel.
Haig (The Labrador Pact, 2008, etc.) writes books in which ordeals endured by endangered families are suggestively linked to circumstantially similar literary works (e.g., Shakespeare’s—as in his novel The Dead Fathers Club’s reworking of Hamlet). Thus, protagonist Terence Cave’s determination to protect his surviving loved one—his musically gifted daughter Bryony—channels Keats’s language and Beethoven’s harmonies, in a disturbed orchestration of overprotectiveness and paranoia. For the death of Bryony’s “slow” twin brother Reuben, resulting from vicious neighborhood bullying, has followed the suicide of her paternal grandmother and the murder of Bryony’s own mother (during a botched robbery). In a book-length “letter” written in Terence’s imagination to the increasingly indignant Bryony, Terence attempts to explain fears that drive him to burden her with draconian rules, harass and interrogate her friends and, finally, confront her “unworthy” boyfriend Denny—who embodies a climactic surprise all too easily foreseen by the reader. Haig labors mightily, overextending what’s essentially an idea for a short story, adhering to Terence’s obsessed viewpoint, as the character’s delusive imaginings lead to outright hallucinations and a final violent act. The ironies are predictable and jejune, the banalities and truisms (e.g., humans’ need to learn the passive “wisdom” of animals) legion, the whole mishmash embarrassingly contrived and over the top. Only the superb opening scene—that of Reuben’s pathetic death—carries genuine conviction. It raises expectations that the rest of the book utterly fails to satisfy.
A bad book from a good writer who needs a new subject.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02056-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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