More Mauritius and less Bosnia might have rescued Anderson’s story from the doldrums.
Second-novelist Anderson (Hidden Latitudes, 1996) offers a languid tale about two naturalists on a tropical island guarding their restoration project from unknown saboteurs.
Fran and Christian are the sole inhabitants of tiny Egret Island, a nature reserve just off the coast of Mauritius. Fran’s mission, a reverse Darwinism (“the survival of the weakest”), is to restore the island to its pre-human state, remove all exotic creatures like monkeys and mongooses, and see that her beloved mourner-birds do not go the way of the dodo. Now middle-aged, Fran was a professor at Berkeley until her husband ended their marriage because she couldn’t give him children. Her Swiss assistant, Christian, is a burnt-out Red Cross official who quit after a brutal hitch in Bosnia, leaving behind his pregnant lover, Nermina, a Muslim. Fran’s former assistant, Satish, a Mauritian, died when his dinghy overturned. There are mysteries here. Was Satish’s death an accident? In what circumstances did Christian abandon Nermina? And who is releasing predators to attack the mourner-birds? Anderson, oh, so slowly drip-feeds us the answers. Christian won’t open up to lonely, bossy Fran about Bosnia but finds release on Mauritius with the lovely Asmita, a restaurant hostess, but ends his courtship abruptly when he realizes she has tricked him into a promise of marriage (too bad the key conversation is missing). When Christian is almost drowned by some locals (the saboteurs?), Fran nurses him back to health, they become, first, confidants, then lovers as Fran reveals that Satish had been her lover too and Christian talks about Nermina, who, he just learned, is still alive, so he must return to Europe. Only at end do we learn that the death of Satish and near-death of Christian were caused by youths working for a corrupt Mauritian businessman who wanted the island for himself; the explanation is feeble and half-hearted.
More Mauritius and less Bosnia might have rescued Anderson’s story from the doldrums.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33199-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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