This semi-autobiographical novel about Portugal’s war in Angola was originally published in 1979.
That war, Portugal’s doomed attempt to hang on to its African colony, lasted from 1961 to 1974. It was conducted ineptly by the Fascist regime of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. The unnamed narrator, a doctor, was conscripted in 1971. He presents us with three selves. The first is the thumbnail sketch of a child and young man who is the product of right-wing youth movements and Catholic ritual. A loner, he is the prisoner of melancholy. That word permeates the novel. The second self is the 20-something doctor unwillingly at war, living in a desolate, hellish series of barracks in Eastern Angola. The PIDE (secret police) agents are fearsome. Antunes challenges himself (and the reader) by describing the scene in dense paragraphs of run-on sentences. What should be incantatory too often becomes monotonous. Moments of relief are few: on leave in Lisbon with his wife and daughter, back in the bush in the arms of Sofia, his African washerwoman; here, the white oppressor granted absolution by his magnanimous black victim is a disappointing stereotype. The narrator becomes radicalized, cursing the Fascists who have sent him on this fool’s errand; yet for him the greatest horror is lacking the courage to protest, even as a PIDE agent inflicts torture, even after learning that they have abducted Sofia. We see the result in the narrator’s third self: the doctor in Portugal several years later, an empty shell. He is talking to a female companion, a late-night bar pick-up. (These moments alternate with the Angola scenes.) He invites her home but is unable to satisfy her; no surprise there. It’s also no surprise that he’s separated from his wife and alienated from his daughters; the author’s grim determinism has foreclosed different outcomes. More effective as an indictment of colonial war than a psychological study.
Pub Date: May 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07776-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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