A deeply flawed great novel, akin to the best work of Zola, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and, arguably, Rabelais.
The lives of two stepbrothers, temperamental opposites nevertheless sworn to love and protect each other, are traced, in exuberant and exhausting detail, in this massive novel, originally published in Taiwan in two volumes in 2005 and 2006.
Chinese author Yu Hua (Cries in the Drizzle, 2007, etc.) creates a rich panorama of post-Mao China during the 1990s, when loose-cannon entrepreneur “Baldy Li” (Li Guan) and his gentle, scholarly “brother” Song Gang follow different paths, despite and because of their shared attraction to Lin Hong, the reigning beauty of the village (Liu Town) in which they grow up, after Baldy Li’s widowed mother Li Lan marries Song Gang’s handsome, intrepid father Song Fenping. When the latter is murdered for being a landowner supposedly unsympathetic to revolutionary principles, Li Lan wastes away, but lives long enough to extract her sons’ promises to honor Song Fenping’s loving nature. But when Song Gang achieves fulfillment in a quiet contemplative life, having won the hand of Lin Hong, Baldy Li hatches one hare-brained moneymaking scheme after another, enlisting creditors from several briskly characterized townsmen and reaching a peak of commercially viable vulgarity with the creation of a “National Virgin Beauty Competition,” whose contestants benefit from surgically implanted artificial hymens. Comparisons to China’s flamboyant image-building during the recent Beijing Olympics are doubtless inevitable. But the novel is even more interesting for the pointed, often hilarious connections Yu Hua makes between the care and manipulation (and voyeuristic observation) of female bodies, and the various “makeovers” to which modern China has subjected itself. The novel is cheerfully vulgar and obscene, insistently declarative and overemphatic. But it’s gripping throughout 600-plus pages, and it rises to a tremendous climax, after Baldy Li’s furious acquisitive energies have precipitated tragedy and created monsters that seem to have emerged, sweating and shrieking, from the realms of myth.
A deeply flawed great novel, akin to the best work of Zola, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and, arguably, Rabelais.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42499-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
