A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.
The impassioned memories of German twin sisters separated in childhood and ever afterward by “the silly obstacles tossed up by history”: that’s the core of this brilliant 1993 novel by a hitherto untranslated Dutch writer.
Anna and Lotte Goudriaan, born in Cologne, are effectively orphaned in early childhood (in the “Interbellum” following WWI) when their mother’s death and their father’s mortal illness send resourceful Anna to be brought up on her grandfather’s farm in a nearby village, and frail Lotte to live with an uncle’s family in the Netherlands. Except for two brief reunions before and after the subsequent war, they live far apart until the 1990s, when by sheer chance they meet again as elderly patients at a spa in Belgium. At first mutually wary, they exchange detailed memories of each other’s past: Lotte’s survival of German occupation during WWII in a household that hides fugitive Jews from the Nazis (an echo of The Diary of Anne Frank) and Anna’s more overtly dramatic life as domestic slave to her choleric relatives (at whose hands she suffers a savage beating that leaves her permanently infertile), chambermaid to an aristocratic anti-Hitler family, wife of a doomed young SS officer, and embittered Red Cross nurse during the war’s final days. De Loo quickly establishes a hypnotic narrative rhythm, juxtaposing the sisters’ richly detailed contrasting reminiscences against their tenuous renewed intimacy, eroded by Anna’s scorn for Lotte’s essentially safe passage through the crucible of conflict and the latter’s barely concealed contempt for Anna’s stubborn solidarity with “ordinary” German people. Has there ever been, one wonders, a more imaginative and moving dramatization of the human cost of the divisions and destruction wreaked by Hitler’s madness? Quite likely not. De Loo’s profoundly elegiac closing pages are a triumph of compassionate empathy, not only for both “sides,” but also for each of these magnificently realized women’s sorrows, sacrifices, and capacity to somehow endure.
A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-200-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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