With quiet sureness, first-timer Leung offers stories almost radical in their humane inclusiveness.
Eleven elegiac debut stories, winner of the 2002 Mary McCarthy Prize, about the fragility of people’s connections both to one another and to their roots.
Most of the pieces tie back in one way or another to Blue Falls, Washington, a classic American small town fallen on hard times. In “Six Ways to Jump Off A Bridge,” Parker, a retired Chinese-American chicken farmer, stands on his deck to watch police investigate a suicide on the nearby bridge built as a tourist attraction over Blue Falls and considers what constitutes the irrevocable moment that led a stranger to suicide or cost Parker his relationship with his only daughter. That daughter appears later in “Who Knew Her Best,” transformed into a porn star named Zen and facing her own irrevocable moment. In “Good Company,” Madeleine, who runs a Blue Falls diner, fights intrusive commercial development of the town while being invaded herself by cancer, and in “Desdemona’s Ruin,” Madeleine’s sister, having left Blue Falls years earlier, waits too long to return. Dexter of “Executing Dexter” is a baby made of bread with which two Blue Falls fourth-grade outsiders—a middle-class black newcomer and his white trash friend—act out their anger and neediness. Several stories deal with characters who share Leung’s Chinese heritage. “White Hand” confronts issues of ethnic allegiance directly, but the ethnicity of the separated couple in “Dog Sleep” is only another undercurrent in their marital discord. Other tales focus on gay men, with a refreshing emphasis on the emotional rather than sexual. In “Leases,” a man recommits himself to his wife in the apartment where for years, with her knowledge, he has met gay lovers. Finally, in the title story, a longtime gay couple take a cross-country road trip to discover the true parameters of their love.
With quiet sureness, first-timer Leung offers stories almost radical in their humane inclusiveness.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-889330-16-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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