A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.
Anti-apartheid author Brink (Devil's Valley, 1999, etc.) has adapted to the new dispensation with stylistically experimental novels. But his latest, except for an awkward trace of magical realism, more conventionally details the painful lessons an old man learns when he falls in love.
Because South Africa is still evolving, current politics are as much a part of the story as ever, but the mood is more somber. Services are breaking down, corruption is rising, and violent crimes are commonplace. In this increasingly menacing situation, where things seems to be falling apart, the protagonist and narrator, 65-year-old widower Ruben Olivier, recounts how the young, beautiful, untrustworthy Tessa Butler comes to be his lodger. His home is built on the 18th-century foundations of a house where a Malay slave, Antje of Bengal, murdered her master's wife. Antje, who was executed thereafter, now roams the house meddling in matters of the heart, though her story, suggesting clumsy parallels to the past, is more intrusive than instructive. After a neighbor is brutally murdered and Ruben suffers a heart attack, his sons insist that he move. They're reassured, however, when Tessa joins him. Ruben, a reclusive librarian whose job was given to a hero of the Struggle, has been mourning his wife, the baby she miscarried, and their subsequent estrangement, but is immediately infatuated with Tessa. Fighting his desires and his jealousy—Tessa has multiple lovers and soon needs an abortion—he eventually helps the family's longtime housekeeper Magrieta find a house after a gang burns her old home down, witnesses thugs sexually assaulting Tessa, and learns more about himself. In time, Tessa, more cliché than character, helps Ruben understand how his reluctance to fight led to a breakdown in his marriage and shaped his past.
A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100654-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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