An uneven story with the ring of authenticity that becomes progressively difficult to follow.
Buchholz’s debut fiction combines an eye-level view of war-ravaged Iraq with a story that centers around lost relationships, longing and regret.
Abu Saheeh works at his small mobile-phone sales shop in an Iraqi village near the border of Kuwait. Situated under a bridge guarded by a single inept soldier, Abu Saheeh’s business grants him a prime vantage point from which to watch the daily convoys of American soldiers and trucks laden with supplies that roll through the outskirts of Safwan. It is to this little shop that a street urchin named Layla, with her odd blue eyes, comes each day to visit with the merchant. Charming Layla chatters about American movie stars and culture, and challenges Abu Saheeh to reach back into his dark and deadly past and relive moments he would prefer to forget. Also in Safwan is his old friend, Bashar, with whom he spent many years in Chicago, both sent there to study medicine by the Iraqi government. Bashar, who owns the small restaurant where Abu Saheeh takes his evening meal, represents a past that slips into Abu Saheeh’s restless and nightmarish dreams night after night. As he courts a wealthy widow, the phone salesman also collaborates with a prominent local resident on a mysterious mission. Buchholz, who now resides in Oman with his family, clearly has an eye for detail; the book boils with observations on the culture and daily life of the residents of Safwan and Baghdad. The author is an astute observer, turning sights, sounds and smells into eloquent snips of the lives of a people who have sustained great loss and devastation. Buchholz’s prose is vivid, perhaps too vivid for some because he neglects no detail of the carnage that characterizes Iraq’s current history and recent past. But the narrative that starts out so clear and compelling fades and dips in the last part of the book, leaving the reader both moved and confused at the same time.
An uneven story with the ring of authenticity that becomes progressively difficult to follow.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-13377-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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