Moving his Bronx characters downtown to Manhattan proves traumatic to Price (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers); he picks up a bad case of angst. Kenny Backer shares lodging with La Donna: "She was a twenty-eight-year-old bank clerk would-be singer; I was a thirty-year-old door-to-door salesman and we both walked around all day like Back to Bataan." When La Donna ups and leaves him, Kenny is in for one very rough week. Desperately, he dives into anything and everything: adolescent nostalgia ("It had been the best and now it was over and nothing ever felt as good"), porno shops, singles-bars, even a look around the gay leather whip'n-sip establishments. What keeps this book afloat long past its torpedoing point is Price's Lenny Bruce-ish, shpritz-style riffery. The high point is a first chapter in which Kenny accompanies La Donna to an audition at a nightclub that perversely caters to connoisseurs of no-talents; next best is Kenny listening to a late-night call-in show, with its requisite I'm-gonna-kill-myself caller. But the voice becomes tiring. Price's disdainful eye, really interested only in watching Kenny, often just winks nastily: a girl in a movie-theater lobby is one of those "minor dancers living in body stockings, hair in a bun, shy, always giving and getting something ceramic and Chinese for presents." Like one of the callers to those phone-in shows, Price is mostly talking to hear himself maintain a solo; the message—we all need someone—is small beer, and Kenny's concluding, scouring descent into S & M depravity comes off less like fiery purification than like a letter home to Mom from Camp Gotterdamerung. Jazzy. Empty.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1978
ISBN: 0312566522
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
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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