A picaresque fairy tale with elements of National Geographic, but also lovely, spare and mystical.
A romantic quest, begun in Mao’s China, turns into an epic of endurance—and a spiritual parable.
In spite of its subtitle, Xinran’s second (after The Good Women of China, 2002) is presented as a memoir, the story of Shu Wen as narrated to the author when the two women met in 1994 in Suzhou. An open letter to Shu Wen ends the book, asking that she resume contact. The short text itself is Wen’s tragic but uplifting fable of devotion and spiritual enlightenment. A child of Mao’s revolution, Wen was educated in medicine and, as a student, met another young doctor, Kejun, whom she fell in love with and married. But their happiness was cut short when Kejun was sent to Tibet with the People’s Liberation Army. After fewer than a hundred days of marriage, he was reported killed, and, unable to accept Kejun’s death, Wen decides to go after him. Joining an army unit, she makes the arduous journey to Tibet, where the soldiers suffer from altitude sickness and are picked off by Tibetan guerillas. A young Tibetan noblewoman named Zhuoma joins Wen’s party, and soon the two women are split off from the soldiers but rescued by a family of nomads. So begins a new life—self-sufficient, purifying, hard and isolated. As the story takes on a more spacious tone, the simple, pared prose lends a kind of balm: Wen learns the nomads’ ways, and time and identity fall away. She finds her soul during this 30-year sojourn and is finally released after discovering Kejun’s fate. He rescued a young Buddhist lama from a sky burial (where corpses are eaten by vultures) but shot a sacred bird and offered himself as a sacrifice to make amends. This knowledge comes to Wen in one of a series of unlikely, fateful encounters that seem to transform the vast Tibetan landscape into a small community packed with symbolic meetings.
A picaresque fairy tale with elements of National Geographic, but also lovely, spare and mystical.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51548-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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