Very much the best book of Karasu’s (Death in Troy, 2002, etc.) to have appeared in English translation (a splendidly...
An elusive novel (apparently completed in the 1970s) by the Turkish author (1930–95) allegorizes a narrator’s pursuit of an unattainable loved one.
There are two intersecting narratives. The central one describes an unnamed narrator’s arrival in a “medieval” city, where he’s drawn to a dark stranger who leads him to a recurring chesslike game in which the city’s inhabitants contend with travelers and tourists. The other contains 12 fabulistic tales about defining voyages and encounters in which distinctions between humans and animals are blurred or questioned. In one, for example, an otherworldly fish becomes the destructive “burden” of the fisherman who catches it; in another, a porcupine observed strolling an Ankara street becomes a metaphor for its observer’s unadventurous, withdrawn life. As the chess game nears its foreordained outcome, the juxtaposed stories are elaborated even more revealingly. A boy trained as an acrobat depends on, and fears, the unpredictable “master” poised to catch him in flight. A scientific researcher discovers that eating the leaves of an exotic plant renders one incapable of lying—and that human beings cannot bear undiluted truth. An adventurer crossing a vast plain learns that “One must turn as a wheel, and move forward.” The reader gradually infers the relevance of these cryptic revelations of commitment, uncertainty, yearning, and self-understanding—and both the novel’s structure (which, we’ve begun to suspect, represents hours in one life’s day, or months in its year) and title are explained in the 12th tale, a story that declares its intention to reconcile “the natural inequality between the creative work and its creator.” Karasu’s fascinating puzzle is thus an illuminating transitional work between the work of Turkey’s romantic realist Yashar Kemal and contemporary postmodernist Orhan Pamuk.
Very much the best book of Karasu’s (Death in Troy, 2002, etc.) to have appeared in English translation (a splendidly lyrical one, incidentally). More, please.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-8112-1551-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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