Doesn’t deliver anything it aims for.
From Murray (A Carnivore’s Inquiry, 2004, etc.), a disappointing novel set in a politically-charged Greece, mainly on the fictionalized island of Aspros in 1963.
It’s much more fun to describe the contents of the novel than to actually read it. Rupert Brigg is visiting Greece to uncover antiquities—even fake ones will do—for the man he calls Uncle William, but who is really his father. Along the way, Brigg meets a cluster of people: Clive and Nathan, a gay couple; Jack and Amanda, an artist and his promiscuous wife; the handsome Nikos, Amanda’s lover; Hester, the wife Rupert divorced; Olivia, who falls in love with Rupert but dies of cancer; and Steve Kelly, a prying newspaperman, as well as various revelers, diggers and double-crossers. In weak homage to Hemingway, there’s an astonishing amount of drinking and smoking. So let’s see…we have Greece, island caves, political and personal intrigue, art (and its simulacrum—see title), adultery, terminal illness and even murder, but it all adds up to very little. The novel has no pace or drive, no buildup or payoff. The murder doesn’t particularly interest the reader, and the revelation of the murderer is practically mentioned as an aside. Even Rupert’s personal tragedy—the death of his two-year-old son Michael—doesn’t give him much depth, and we don’t feel sympathetic to his coping mechanisms. We’re told how talented an artist Jack is, but the idolatry on which the novel ends seems misplaced. At one point Rupert seems to uncover in himself some aptitude for art, perhaps arising from his training as an expert in authenticating furniture, but with his usual ennui he explains to Nikos that he has “no creative urge. No obsession. No glorious dementia… No gift.” That about sums things up.
Doesn’t deliver anything it aims for.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1844-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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