While at times a bit facile and almost overly clever, an ultimately fascinating commentary on race and identity.
A realistic book with surrealistic twists that allows the author to explore themes of race in contemporary South Africa.
Brink (Before I Forget, 2007, etc.) presents his narrative in three discrete but related parts. The first, “The Blue Door,” begins with an allusion to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a story that supplies an appropriate metaphor for the world Brink’s characters inhabit. David and Lydia are preparing for a dinner party with their friends Steve and Carla. As David, an artist who has recently experienced some commercial success, steps through the blue door that leads to his house, he’s greeted by cries of “Daddy!”—strange, because in their nine years of marriage he and Lydia have had no children. An even bigger shock occurs when he’s also greeted by his “wife,” Sarah, a black woman of great beauty and sex appeal. Just as Gregor Samsa tries to make sense of his situation, Steve also is bewildered but ultimately accepting of this strange new world. “Mirror” involves a similar tale of transformation. This story focuses on Steve and Carla, but here Steve looks into the elaborate art nouveau mirror Carla has bought and discovers he is in fact black. Other characters take this dream reality at face value (no pun intended)—for them Steve has always been black—but Steve needs to accommodate himself to a new self-image, one that he doesn’t comfortably inhabit. Toward the end of this section he and Carla are having a quiet dinner at a local restaurant when they’re interrupted by five masked thugs. Carla startles Steve by urging him to engage these quasi-terrorists in a dialogue because “‘You’re one of them.’ ” The final episode follows the relationship between Derek Hugo, a pianist who teaches the two talented daughters of Steve and Carla, and Nina Rousseau, a talented but reclusive soprano, who wind up being caught in the same terrifying restaurant experience.
While at times a bit facile and almost overly clever, an ultimately fascinating commentary on race and identity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4022-1391-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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