Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for...
Everyone and his butler thinks he can do the Wodehouse voice. They’re all wrong, but Schott’s version, a painstaking facsimile rendered in spun sugar, has its own particular charm.
From 1915 to 1974, the British humorist and immortal genius P.G. Wodehouse tickled readers’ palates with tales of the well-born, well-heeled Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse balanced frenetic plots with wordplay that drew its zing from the contrast between Bertie’s breeziness and Jeeves’ formality. All the elements are here in Schott’s version: country weekends with the “Aged Relative,” impersonations, taxi chases, narrow escapes across rooftops, matrimonial engagements that threaten like thunderstorms. Familiar characters stay in character: Madeline Bassett moons over daisy chains, Roderick Spode stomps around in his fascist black shorts, Uncle Tom obsesses over antique silver, and Bingo, Freddie, Barmy, Tuppy, and Catsmeat booze it up with Bertie at the Drones Club. Schott, known for his charming trivia (Schott's Quintessential Miscellany, 2011, etc.), is capable of true Wodehousian flights in lines like “From across the auditorium came a clatter of chairs and the resounding ‘thud’ of a tall man overestimating a low door” or “The majority of Dronesmen suffer from advanced cases of ergophobia—a sloth-inducing affliction that is as crippling as it is contagious. Medical Science has hitherto been reluctant to recognize ergophobia as a genuine diagnosis, but if Medical Science ever popped into the Drones Club on a weekday afternoon, then Medical Science’s bow tie would spin round and round in amazement.” But where the master’s own voice seems to burble forth as effortlessly as a gutter’s in a downpour, Schott gives the impression of infinite—if gleeful—labor. He even includes endnotes. The endnotes are a joy, as one might expect from the author of Schott’s Miscellany, but still.
Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for more will welcome Schott’s homage, which was authorized by the Wodehouse estate.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-52460-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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