Dark and beguiling; Remizov is a writer worth knowing about, and this slender volume makes a good start.
An all but forgotten, little-translated Russian writer emerges from the shadows with this sometimes-bleak, sometimes-surreal tale.
Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin is a bookkeeper so meticulous in his work that his colleagues in a turn-of-the-century, pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg brokerage call him “the German.” Alas, one day the books don’t balance, and though Marakulin thinks it’s a practical joke, he’s fired. Being sacked first gives him the bracing realization that “a man is as indifferent as a beam to the fate of another,” then plunges him into the existential doldrums. A leading proponent of modernism, Remizov (1877–1957) often took themes from Russian folklore and religion and worked them into his fiction; here the story of Marakulin is less folkloric, though, and more a mashup of Dickens and Gogol, the poor clerk as a sad sack of an Everyman, the ratty tenement in which he lives a microcosm—and a kind of living museum of every kind of suffering. The “sisters of the cross” of the title are the women of the building, who, since the men are off at work, are the exemplars of the world’s soul-trying harshness; one, for instance, is the widow of a famed general who, by dint of that connection, has a nicer apartment than most and invites the fate of Aliona Ivanovna of Crime and Punishment; she winds up, in one of several unpleasant scenes, “lying on the pavement with her spine shattered and her face pushed into the stones.” Since Marakulin has inherited a kind of dumb innocence from his ethereal mother, who “was moved and tormented by everything,” it’s easy to play him, all the more so when he is smitten by a fallen actress, Verochka. The narrative is sometimes fusty, the echoes of the passion a little evident, but the out-of-the-blue ending is worth the price of admission.
Dark and beguiling; Remizov is a writer worth knowing about, and this slender volume makes a good start.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18542-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
