There’s nothing flashy here, but each image, moment, and word counts and builds as the characters’ lives overlap—overlap in...
Life is an accumulation of told and, more importantly, untold stories in a quietly remarkable linked collection (a second from Lordan: And Both Shall Row, 1998) about a couple who retire to Ireland.
Lyle and Mary move from Ohio to Galway, where Mary grew up. In the early episodes, we watch them adjust in small yet telling ways to their new life within the old structure they’re used to in behaving with each other. Mary, ever patient but with a streak of independence, learns to discard her romanticized expectations, while gruff, seemingly oblivious Lyle finds ways to enjoy being an expatriate despite his loneliness. The marriage, like any long marriage, combines unspoken affection with barely hidden grievances, private longing with solicitousness. “Digging” goes back into the couple’s early romance, while in “The Man with the Lapdog,” Lyle befriends a tourist couple (a dying American teacher and his wife), but his attraction to the wife leads him back to an appreciation of Mary. In “Evening,” Mary has tea once with “the man of her dreams.” Two years later, after running into him on the street, she takes home his dog as a favor and Lyle is overjoyed to receive what Mary lets him assume is a birthday present as the other man’s abandoned pet becomes Lyle’s companion and solace. The first half of the book is largely about what makes Mary and Lyle a unit, but with Mary’s death from pneumonia, the narrative shifts, taking on a more forward momentum. Lyle is joined by the couple’s two grown sons, who were clearly closer to Mary than to Lyle. As the three men sort out their relationship, Mary becomes not a sentimental memory but a pervasive absence and cause of concrete grief—perhaps Lordan’s real subject.
There’s nothing flashy here, but each image, moment, and word counts and builds as the characters’ lives overlap—overlap in connections the more powerful for their subtlety.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053036-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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