by Nicole Krauss ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2002
A bit too theme-driven and intermittently static, but Krauss is a highly intelligent writer. It’ll be interesting to see...
There are some lovely moments (and echoes of early Saul Bellow) in this interestingly conceived first novel, but its somewhat attenuated account of an amnesiac’s quest for his missing years trails off into improbability and inconclusiveness.
The story begins in a desert near Las Vegas where Columbia University English professor (and California native) Samson Greene is found wandering, bereft of memory or purpose. He’s returned home to his frantic wife Anna, and undergoes successful surgery for the removal of a benign brain tumor—but thereafter cannot remember his life beyond the age of 12. For example, he no longer knows Anna, and they gradually drift apart. While in therapy he learns of an experimental medical procedure promising to assist memory, and travels west again, to become a volunteer patient. Hesitant relationships—with the research scientist who proposes to “implant” in his brain the memories of another man, as well as with his chosen “Input” (i.e., memory “donor”), an amusingly Babbitt-like businessman, among others more briefly encountered—are prelude to a deeply ironic “awakening” as the burden of what Samson now “remembers” propels him on yet another quest: for the grave of his mother, whose recent death lies hidden among the scattered fragments of his recent years. Krauss tells her strange story—a knotty combination of psychological novel and cautionary science-fiction tale—with considerable finesse, crafting graceful compound-complex sentences charged with understated emotion and given subtle twists of meaning by frequent qualifications and reversals. Samson’s captivity and confusion are quite movingly rendered, especially during the lengthy dénouement, which introduces the affecting figure of “Sammy’s” senile great-uncle Max, himself a “prisoner” (in a nursing home), likewise robbed of his memory. Alas, following this vivid sequence, Krauss seems uncertain how to end her story.
A bit too theme-driven and intermittently static, but Krauss is a highly intelligent writer. It’ll be interesting to see what she turns to next.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50399-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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PERSPECTIVES
by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
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
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by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
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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