De Moor is rapidly becoming one of the world’s finest novelists.
A troubled union of two artistic temperaments feels “the powerful effects of music on our emotions,” in an elegant short novel from the internationally acclaimed Dutch author (Duke of Egypt, 2002, etc.).
De Moor’s story is a subtly elusive composition centered in two meetings, ten years apart, between the unnamed narrator, an earnest musicologist, and Marius van Vlooten, an unusually self-reliant blind music critic. They first meet when stranded together at an Amsterdam airport while awaiting a delayed flight to Bordeaux, where both are to attend a master class for string quartets. Van Vlooten reveals the cause of his blindness (a botched suicide attempt, over a failed love affair). The narrator introduces the critic to beautiful young violinist Suzanna Flier. As he later learns, the two fall in love and wed, but endure a tempestuous marriage marred by her casual (possibly adulterous?) relations with colleagues and his seething jealousy—in a manner echoing the plot of Tolstoy’s mordant novella The Kreutzer Sonata (inspired by a Beethoven chamber work and itself the source of Leos Janacek’s 1927 string quartet, which Suzanna performs, brilliantly). The details of “this spiral of passion and fate” emerge when the two men cross paths a decade later, as each is en route to the Salzburg Music Festival. The story is then concluded “sixteen years later” as the narrator—alone this time aboard an airplane—reads a newspaper account of the incident that ended the tortured “sonata” played (as it were) by Suzanna and Marius. It’s a deliciously conceived and executed mystery, seasoned with acute perceptions of how both music and life are seen, heard, and imperfectly experienced and understood by whatever senses humans command. And it’s a strikingly ingenious homage to the great originals (and copies) of Beethoven, Tolstoy, and Janacek.
De Moor is rapidly becoming one of the world’s finest novelists.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-744-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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