An impressively savvy political novel that compares interestingly with Robert Stone's Damascus Gate (1998).
An increasingly suspenseful debut novel from the award-winning New Yorker writer (The Rainy Season, 1989) that spins a persuasively elaborate plot from a tragic "incident" at a Jerusalem checkpoint.
During a time of continuing terrorist attacks, Palestinian visitors to the new City are detained by Israeli officer-in-charge Lieutenant Ari Doron: among them are American-born Marina Hajimi, en route with her two-year-old son to visit her husband Hassan, a political prisoner. The asthmatic child, thus denied immediate medical treatment, dies in his mother's arms. The ensuing public outcry is exploited by Israeli and Palestinian spokesmen alike, and several other major characters soon enter the action. Marina's father George Raad, a Boston cardiologist and an Edward Said–like émigré intellectual, flies to his daughter's side in the country he had "abandoned"—and endures a disturbing reunion with his former boyhood friend, radical activist Ahmed Amr ("a wrong-headed Bedouin astride a fiery stallion, recklessly leading boys to their deaths"). The task of protecting the despised Doron (and of orchestrating much-needed damage control) brings in Israeli army veteran Colonel Daniel Yizhar, a wily political realist perfectly willing to use lies in service of "the truth." And the hunt for Doron, who in fact never attempts to hide, or claim he was "only following orders," engages Palestinian brothers Adnan and Mahmoud Sheukhi, the latter of whom burns to prove himself a devout nationalist. The story builds terrific tension as Wilentz draws her several subplots gradually together, and a series of staggered climaxes (including the consequences of Raad's physical and psychic failings, Doron's confused gestures toward expiation, and the fate of Marina's husband Hassan—freed by the Israelis, but unfree of the commitments that engulf him) underscores its bleak, unassailable central themes: that in this helplessly fragmented corner of the world, "everyone was an extremist because everyone wanted things simple" and that "Endings did not happen here."
An impressively savvy political novel that compares interestingly with Robert Stone's Damascus Gate (1998).Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85436-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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