Charming if somewhat oblique fiction, quirky and unpredictable.
The fourth of Hoffman’s books to be published by New Directions (Bernhard, 1998, etc.) departs from his previous work to head for a gentler place.
Hoffman is Israel’s foremost avant-garde fiction writer, a game-player whose work is reminiscent of other magicians like Walter Abish and the OULIPO gang. His other works have been dark and brooding ruminations on the permutations of recent Jewish history from the Holocaust to the tragedies of the Middle East conflict, but this latest is lighthearted, playful, almost impish. Told in a series of 237 very brief vignettes (seldom longer than a dozen lines), it’s the story of Yehoahim, who is 43 and lives in the port city of Haifa, where he’s recovering from the collapse of his marriage. He seems to do little else but sit in cafes and in his apartment, pondering the inner life of inanimate objects. Eventually, though, he meets and falls in love with Batya, a beautiful woman with a Mongolian baby. His love is reciprocated, and at story’s end the trio constitute a family of sorts. Yehoahim is out of sync with the real world in some deep but not disturbing way; indeed, he seems to be at one with his narrator, giving the novel the feel of something like a postmodern slapstick reworking of Sartre’s Nausea. Hoffman’s narrative derives much of its humor from his surrealist juxtapositions: Batya’s “toes refute the theory of relativity,” Yehoahim’s closet has a name and personality, winter flights are cheap because one can “grab hold of the wing of the plane, as in a picture by Chagall.” Underlying all this giddiness there is a sweet, gentle sensibility that achieves a satisfying completeness in a final epiphany of sacred and profane love. Cole’s translation is amply footnoted and deft at catching Hoffman’s complex network of biblical and literary references.
Charming if somewhat oblique fiction, quirky and unpredictable.Pub Date: April 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-8112-1465-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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