No reader will be impoverished for having skipped this one.
A psychiatrist’s erotic desires run amok, bringing ruin to many lives.
The novel, an amalgam of erotica and tragic romance with clear literary aspirations, begins with an italicized section describing the main character running in a park, godlike, exuding a sexual magnetism that allows him (in his 60s) to seduce with a glance a much younger woman running past him. They enter the woods for an immediate tryst, which the author describes in pornographic, philosophical and mythological language. The narrative switches to first person to describe the unnamed psychiatrist’s compulsions to seduce his patients, as he operates two separate “cabinets” (offices), one called “Drear” for his mundane clients and the other “Spells” for the ones with whom he is sexually involved. The doctor’s inner monologue oscillates between confident narcissism (he is all-powerful, perhaps even doing therapeutic good through these affairs) and awareness of his decadence and impending doom. He longs to be caught, and death is in the air alongside the ubiquitous sex. Moreover, he has a compulsion to leave clues—verbal and otherwise—for his wife Akiko (the collector of the titular netsuke) to find. He is able to sustain his affairs with myriad patients and strangers until he meets David, a new patient whom he immediately designates for Spells—he's attracted to him as a man—but no, David is a woman named Jello, a drag queen. Inevitably, it all comes crashing down as lovers and wife become aware that the doctor has been very busy.
No reader will be impoverished for having skipped this one.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56689-253-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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