There’s simply too much of everything. Montero captures the reader’s attention, but the story flies apart before the reader...
Organized crime and disorganized personal relations are tightly intertwined in the prolific Cuban-born Puerto Rican author’s latest (The Captain of the Sleepers, 2005, etc.).
It begins most auspiciously, with a killer first sentence that links the death of a New York mobster with the ill-fated escape of a hippopotamus from the Havana zoo. Nothing that follows is nearly as entertaining, though Montero presents a lively bevy of mutually involved characters, notably 22-year-old newspaper reporter Joaquín Porrata, who has retreated from his family’s numerous dysfunctions (philandering dad, unstable mom, sexually befuddled younger sister) to work for a local daily, where he’s “allowed to interview only comedians and whores.” Acting on a tip from an old pal, who works at the zoo, Joaquín connects dots that suggest crime boss Umberto Anastasia was whacked before he could receive a “message”—presumably sent by Havana-based crime lord Meyer Lansky and his boys, to discourage any rival gangs from muscling in on their casinos (it’s the late-1950s, when crime still paid quite well). A parallel story, narrated by a one-armed circus performer (Yolanda, for whom Joaquín falls hard), unearths many more secrets, endangering Joaquín and his loved ones—and, alas, permits the narrative to wander all over the Western hemisphere, distracting the reader’s focus as it sedulously fills in blanks. Montero has done her homework, and the novel is filled with bizarre characters (a gay choreographer afflicted with leprosy is by no means the most outré), rapid-fire action and enough blood and guts to satisfy a cage of hungry lions.
There’s simply too much of everything. Montero captures the reader’s attention, but the story flies apart before the reader can take hold of it.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-10277-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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