A poignant and challenging look at the way the past and present collide.
Hope and heartbreak abound in this debut collection set among Native Americans in the northwest.
There is a moment early in the story “Katydid” where the narrator and her best friend are joking about what an Indian version of The Cosby Show might have looked like—the patriarch would have “a huge collection of loud ribbon shirts,” they decide—when the narrator thinks to herself, “It’s surprising how much material can be mined from making Indian versions of things.” Piatote, who is Nez Perce and teaches Native American studies at UC Berkeley, has some of her most satisfying moments in this collection by doing just that. The narrator of “wIndin!” is an artist creating a Monopoly-esque board game based on contemporary Indian life (“Indian tokens or token Indians?” she wonders) while simultaneously navigating the loneliness of being single and the tangled love life of her gay best friend. The book’s longest piece is a verse play called “Antíkoni” that revisits Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone by setting it against the backdrop of museum treatment of Indian artifacts and remains in the age of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Piatote’s Antigone, rather than burying her brother illicitly, steals his remains back from an unscrupulous museum director. All of Piatote’s pieces, in fact, draw heavily on political and historical issues, from the Battle at Wounded Knee (“The News of the Day”) to the Fish Wars of the 1960s and '70s (“Fish Wars”). Though some of the slighter pieces feel like mere vehicles for ideas, at her best Piatote balances the emotional complexities of her characters’ lives with the political complexity of their relationship with an America all too eager to look away.
A poignant and challenging look at the way the past and present collide.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-268-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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