Beautifully written, astutely observed, and as maddeningly inconclusive as life itself. Miller remains a gifted, thoughtful...
Booker- and Whitbread-shortlisted Miller (Oxygen, 2002, etc.) follows the shell-shocked wanderings of a British photographer haunted by an African massacre.
Clem Glass has returned to London, not even daring to develop the negatives of the photos he snapped at the church in N—, where hundreds of men, women, and children were hacked to pieces on the orders of a man named Sylvestre Ruzinanda. (An Author’s Note acknowledges the incident is based on an actual one in Rwanda.) He’s drinking heavily, going to mindless movies, afraid to be alone with his thoughts when his father phones to say that Clem’s older sister, Clare, has had a nervous breakdown, similar to one she suffered 25 years ago as a college student. There’s some mysterious distance between Clare and their father, who’s retreated to a monastery since the death of his wife, a politically active socialist lawyer. At first Clem can’t deal with her either, but he finally takes Clare from the sanitarium to a Somerset cottage they vacationed in as children. She begins tentatively to improve, even as sensitively rendered interactions with the siblings’ cousins and aunt (it’s her cottage) suggest that no one in their extended family is without emotional wounds. Clem remains obsessed with the massacre at N—, particularly after reading the written account handed him by his fellow eyewitness, journalist Frank Silverman. When he learns that Ruzinanda has surfaced in Brussels, Clem hops the next plane for the book’s curiously irresolute climactic section, in which he confronts the killer and is challenged by a young woman (related in some way to Ruzinanda) who reminds him of Europeans’ genocidal activities in Africa. As in his previous three outings, Miller subtly limns the characters’ anxieties and anomie, creating a palpable atmosphere of tension and moral dread. But we long for a finale more definitive than a nearly irrelevant wedding and Clem’s bizarre confession to a crime that never occurred.
Beautifully written, astutely observed, and as maddeningly inconclusive as life itself. Miller remains a gifted, thoughtful writer in search of stronger plot lines.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100727-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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