One of the finest coming-of-age tales of recent years, and a splendid novelistic debut by a writer who seems to be just now...
The ghosts of Jack London, Thomas Wolfe, and Jack Kerouac all hover approvingly over a terrific first novel by Heighton, an Ontario poet and storywriter (Flight Paths of the Emperor, not yet published in the US, etc.).
There’s even a chapter entitled “Look Homeward, Angel” in this chronicle of the early life and education of Sevigne Torrins, a hopeful writer who grows up in Ontario’s Sault Sainte Marie on the shores of Lake Superior. In beautiful long, looping rhapsodic sentences studded with vigorous images, Heighton begins his tale with a lengthy account of Sevigne’s conflicted relationship with his father Sam, a ship’s cook, devout alcoholic, and effusive autodidact whose habit of mangled quotation from favorite books and authors stimulates and irritates the fledgling poet whom he’s affectionately (if casually) nurturing. Though Sam is a great character, Sevigne’s mother Martine, a vibrant beauty whose love-hate relationship with Sam ends in her departure to live in Cairo with a career diplomat, is less fully realized. In general Heighton does much better with male characters, especially as the story’s focus broadens to depict Sevigne’s undistinguished career as an amateur boxer, his brief trip to Egypt to re-bond with Martine and his older brother Bryon, and his entry into Toronto’s literary subculture, where he begins publishing work and builds relationships with a tough-minded poet (Una), the troubled singer (Mikaela, a.k.a. “Ike”) whom he almost marries, and—most interestingly—moody, mercurial fellow writer Ray, who plays Neal Cassaday to Sevigne’s Jack Kerouac. The climax comes with Sevigne’s retreat to live alone in a lighthouse on remote Rye island in northern Lake Superior: a tour-de-force account of loneliness, privation, and suffering that calls to mind London’s classic story of man-vs.-nature “To Build a Fire.”
One of the finest coming-of-age tales of recent years, and a splendid novelistic debut by a writer who seems to be just now entering a most impressive maturity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-13933-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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