A head-spinning tour through the corridors of history and popular culture, and one of this sly entertainer’s liveliest yet.
An experience of “retrograde amnesia” stimulates journeys into both the darkened past and the undisclosed future—in the celebrated Italian polymath’s fifth erudite doorstopper (Baudolino, 2002, etc.).
Sixtyish book dealer Giambattista (“Yambo”) Bodoni awakens in a Milan hospital after a heart attack that has erased all memory of his own life while leaving every scrap of every book, comic strip, pop song, movie and the like he has ever experienced perfectly intact. This splendid premise yields rich comedy in early pages that describe Yambo’s bemused return to the home and family he no longer recognizes. Complications multiply when his wife Paola (a highly intelligent psychologist) persuades Yambo to retreat to Solaro, the country home owned by his grandfather (also a bookseller), where Yambo spent much of his childhood. Rummaging through old books and newspapers, letters, photographs, school notebooks and other memorabilia, Yambo retrieves details that partially explain his lifelong fascination with the phenomenon of fog and the concept of the “mysterious flame” that, he senses, quickens his imagination—and is “reminded” of Lila Saba, the girl he first loved. Then Eco throws things into another gear, as a “second incident” puts Yambo back in hospital, and into a coma in which his memory returns. We learn how he grew up in “Il Duce’s” Italy, forsaking a religious conversion for the promises of sex, and surviving a perilous wartime adventure every bit the equal of his storybook heroes’ exploits. Finally, attended by all the figures who graced his reading and dreaming, Yambo prepares himself for his reunion with Lila Saba. This charming story’s considerable self-indulgence is largely vitiated by dozens of wonderful period illustrations, the fun of trying to recognize numerous mangled literary and subliterary quotations, and its protagonist’s ebullient (however damaged) sensibility.
A head-spinning tour through the corridors of history and popular culture, and one of this sly entertainer’s liveliest yet.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101140-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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