Though well-crafted, this genteel novel never quite achieves liftoff.
A debut novel that tells the unlikely story of an English farm wife and a Danish museum curator through their spirited correspondence.
Loneliness draws them together—that and their keen interest in the prehistoric Tollund Man, whose perfectly preserved head is on display in Denmark’s Silkeborg museum. Tina Hapgood has always wanted to visit there from her home in East Anglia; but having passed her 60th birthday, she doubts she ever will. Anders Larsen—intercepting a note she’s written to the (now deceased) archaeologist who discovered the Tollund Man in 1950—encourages her to make the trip. And so it begins. Tina, we learn from her letters, married at 20 and had the first of her three children shortly thereafter. Her marriage is loveless, and she has many regrets about roads not taken. Anders, a widower with two grown children, loved his wife deeply; but the marriage was fraught owing to her emotional fragility. Tina and Anders exchange confidences, and their connection—though limited to written exchanges—becomes more intimate. (In a nod to modern technology, the pair eventually shifts from letters to emails.) The book proceeds at a leisurely pace until close to the end, when a major plot turn seems to change everything. Or does it? The writing is, for the most part, poised and literate; and Tina’s descriptions of the natural world she knows so well can be quite lovely. Unfortunately, she sounds way too sophisticated given the cloistered life she is supposed to have led. There is also an overly earnest quality to some of what Tina and Anders write to one another: “We have been talking to each other about where life went, and if the way we spent it was the way we meant to have spent it….” (Tina) “Our letters have meant so much to us because we have…arrived at the same point in our lives. More behind us than ahead of us. Paths chosen that define us.” (Anders)
Though well-crafted, this genteel novel never quite achieves liftoff.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-29516-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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