Emotional intensity and a powerful sense of the fragility and impermanence of both the physical body and the social fabric are the distinguishing features of this 1991 novel by the Israeli author (Katschen & The Book of Joseph, not reviewed). A collage of brief vignettes presents the experiences and ruminations of Bernhard Stein, a middle-aged German Jew who, in the 1930s, has fled Berlin for Palestine, where he mourns the death of his beloved wife Paula and endures visionary glimpses of the exterior world’s collapse as an objective correlative to the fragmentation of his own psyche (“When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, the ships anchored in Bernhard’s head go up in flames”). The novel’s structure emphasizes the insistent onward momentum of Bernhard’s chaotically busy mind: the 172 brief —chapters— overlap, the ending of one becoming the start of the opening sentence of the next. Redundancy and monotony aren—t entirely avoided, but Hoffmann does assemble a vividly individual character in his solipsistic protagonist’s cleverly linked memories and fantasies. Bernhard’s keenly felt longing for his late wife stimulates not only an unresolved relationship with an attractive widow but contrary intimations of the aroused body’s imminent decay. News of Hitler’s devastation of Europe and the war’s “progress” on several fronts intensifies Bernhard’s increasingly frequent withdrawals into the life he imagines for his invented alter ego “D.S. Gregory,” a dermatologist whose Russian father was a casualty of the American Revolutionary War. And the dreamer’s hopeful recourse to the consolation implicit in poetry, biblical wisdom, and the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza is rudely shaken by such implacable phenomena as the Palestinian government’s decision to disallow “ram’s horns, whose sound resembles the sound of an air-raid siren, to be blown in the synagogues,” and by the inability of his own arthritic fingers to form the sign “V-Day.” Not an easy read, but a further persuasive illustration of the genius of one of Israel’s finest contemporary writers.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-8112-1389-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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