A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed and stunted emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie, Roy,...
The condition of a stranger in a familiar land is dramatized with beguiling simplicity and tact in this deeply moving fourth novel from the young Indian author (Freedom Song, 1999, etc.).
Jayojit Chatterjee, exhausted and embittered after a year’s worth of divorce proceedings against his unfaithful wife, takes a vacation as well from his teaching job at a midwestern university, and returns with his seven-year-old son Vikram (“Bonny”—because he “lies over the ocean”?) to Calcutta to visit his aging parents. Everything about this sentimental journey and willed plunge into harmony and amity is destined to fail, or fall short of expectations. Jayojit, an economist, can neither fathom Calcutta’s formless commercialism nor contrive a sound investment strategy for his father “the Admiral” (stricken by heart disease and diabetes and subsisting on a meager pension); his mother’s frantic efforts at cooking nourish neither son nor grandson; and Jayojit (ironically nicknamed “Joy”) supposedly works away at a book, yet a profound inertia settles over him. Thinking of a second marriage, he nevertheless cannot stir himself to try to meet women—and his custody of his beloved son is only temporary (two months a year). But somehow, magically, Chaudhuri makes of this virtually plot-free story a compelling drama of alienation and resignation. Every delicately chosen detail helps build an overwhelming sense of people out of place (once-familiar streets now seem un-navigable mazes), out of time (Bonny plays with plastic dinosaurs and pterodactyls), out of touch. So firmly does Chaudhuri limit Jayojit’s horizons that at the close, as he flies back to America and engages in conversation with a friendly young woman, their brief connection is summarized thus: “[Jayojit] felt not the slightest attraction towards her, and was reassured to sense that she probably felt none towards him.”
A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed and stunted emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie, Roy, and especially (the Chekhovian master Chaudhuri most closely resembles) R.K. Narayan.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41093-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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