An utterly captivating story of identity whose reissue should be heartily welcomed.
This latest reissue of a modern classic (an earlier edition called Hermaphrodeity, by Alan Friedman, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973) shows the many lives and loves of a hermaphrodite.
Early on in life, a little girl named Millie Nemos begins to suspect she might be different from other girls. Precocious sex games with her brother Sandy provoke very confusing reactions, and by the time she enters college, she’s sarcastically aware of the whole truth: “I was their prize—Harvard’s only genuine hermaphrodite.” Her story is a ribald, hugely entertaining tale of sexual encounters and torrid love affairs (and occasionally even “beatific, humdrum love”) in far-flung locales, as Millie—and her masculine self, Willie—wanders hilariously all over the sexual landscape. There’s a combustible relationship with the sultry Flaminia (the author has a good deal of innocent fun with character names) and a more complicated, long-term encounter with her boss, professor Satori—“I see his heavy head with its shag rug of yellow-white hair, I see his ugly nose (enormous—more than a facial feature, it was a trademark), I see the thick, dirty nails with which he scraped walls and dirt and powdery clay and spidery coral”—and with another powerful older man, the enigmatic art collector Mr. Tieger. All the while, Millie/Willie searches restlessly for a deeper purpose in life, compulsively reading and writing with the mindset that “there was a mystery in me, ancient and undeciphered and prehuman.” The author (anonymous this time around) packs this story of “the mind-splitting polarity of my personality—a public man with a private womb”—with entertaining, often quite lovely prose. Deeper philosophical ruminations on the nature of sexuality and poetry run convincingly alongside well-done adventures in exotic locations; in a standout episode, there’s an interlude in “the blind glory of Venice” and a taut encounter there with a surprisingly complex gondolier. The book’s climactic turn into the world of big business and tricky advertising forms a perfect coda to this story about selling a narrative of the self.
An utterly captivating story of identity whose reissue should be heartily welcomed.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475985269
Page Count: 538
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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