Miss Tyler's family webs which vibrate with the slightest whisper usually take place in crumbling frame houses, all with that faint sweet odor of failure, roaches and dusty vestibules. Such as the Baltimore boarding house owned by the recently deceased Mrs. Pauling and her artist son, 38 year-old Jeremy, a recluse. Cocoon-raised Jeremy is in that soft, vulnerable, pupal stage of arrest where, oddly enough, one may be a very good artist. He makes pictures, declares Miss Vinton, a crusty spinster boarder, "the way other men make maps — setting down the few fixed points that he knows (to) guide him. . . through this unfamiliar planet." Among the other roomers is Mary Tell, with her child, runaway from a young marriage and skittish lover, penniless and lonesome. She is then abruptly receptive to a marriage arrangement (her husband refuses divorce) with Jeremy. "Something new" is the uniting hope for both which leads Jeremy to a fresh and stable dependence, Mary to happy child-bearing. But "they might have been taking two separate rides." Mary's woman's world is entire and complete but Jeremy still navigates by invisible stars. Mary leaves and finally Jeremy makes his one heroic try at doing what he believes fathers and husbands are supposed to do (repair houses, take children on outings). But, rejected, he returns to his house and old age, with Miss Vinton, the other "clay duck." Miss Tyler has trouble with Jeremy — he represents more than he is which is rather a dodo. But her decaying hermitages still stimulate and entrap.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0449911802
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1973
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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