A story of remarkable endurance at sea conveyed unremarkably.
Adrift in a disabled boat in the Pacific, two fishermen try to survive.
Despite the weather forecast, Bolivar, a brash fisherman and drinker who’s desperate for money, insists on heading out to fish. The only problem? His partner is missing. So his boss introduces him to Hector, a sensitive teenager without any serious experience at sea. Even before the storm damages their engine and blows them hundreds of miles into the Pacific, the two men are at odds, but, adrift at sea—with no radio, a minimum of fishing gear, and diminishing chances of rescue—they're forced to reckon more deeply with each other and themselves and various miragelike visions of the lives behind them on land. Can they learn to respect each other? Can they vanquish their dehydration, starvation, the maddening vastness of the sea? Can they keep each other alive? Irish novelist Lynch (Grace, 2017, etc.) is at his most memorable when relating the details of sea life and survival: The sea is a veritable marketplace of plastic bags, barrels, cups, and other useful things; an albatross’ “insides are full of undigested plastic”; a captured turtle “gestures some unfathomable thought with its flippers”; and the men subsist on fish, seabirds, and barnacles scraped from the hull of the boat and seasoned with brine. But Lynch’s characters are less impressive than these details, perhaps because they seem too-perfectly-constructed foils for one another: Hector’s religiosity, for example, feels less like an authentically worn belief than a useful contrast to Bolivar’s materialism and secular hope. And though Lynch at times beautifully encapsulates the harshness of life on the ocean—“each bead of water that passes the lips…is a drop of time and life distilled”—his sentences are too often stilted, overstylized, and full of half-profound sentimentality: “[Bolivar] studies the outness of the world. The profound colours of night. His ear attending to the silence. A growing feeling of awareness coming upon him. What you are among this. He imagines an ocean full of container ships and tankers, each ship moving constant and true and yet all passing within this same silence, the silence itself passing within this outness that is itself always silent.”
A story of remarkable endurance at sea conveyed unremarkably.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-11243-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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