Absent clear guidance, take these lessons: Stay clear of beer bongs. And of this book, too.
A novel that begins with epigrams from the Pixies, the Clash and Milton has good potential. Don’t let it fool you.
After a promising debut with The Method Actors (2005), a layered portrait of expats in Japan, Shuker takes an odd step backward, time-wise and otherwise, into the demimonde of collegiate underachievers on New Zealand’s South Island. It’s the aoristic modern age, and 18-year-old Richard Sauer, aka Souse, is a mess who thrives on video nasties, ganja, piss (that is, beer) and piss bongs. “Students are allowed, expected, even obliged to keep up the image—carry out new feats of bonging, drink the most, the quickest, for the longest duration.” He has spent most of his grants and student allowances but has yet to attend a class, and, as the cancer-stricken angel who, one supposes, stands for all that is good—his opposite, that is—reminds him, it’s April. Oh, yes, young master Sauer is possibly suicidal and certainly violent: Early on, he beats his parents’ little dog, while even earlier on, he rapes a young woman. Given this résumé, it seems that his options are limited: He can join the army or the police, become a mechanic, go to tech school or stay at home “going insane on the dole.” He does quite worse than all that. His parents aren’t much help in Souse’s decline and fall, though they try to be; think of Alex’s mum and pop in A Clockwork Orange, and you’re most of the way there. Souse is just as bad a piece of work. Shuker writes well, and the stream-of-consciousness weirdness coming out of Souse has moments. But the point of the exercise seems to be unclear, unless it’s to report the dreariness of life in the postindustrial Antipodes or warn of what listening to one too many Cure songs can lead to.
Absent clear guidance, take these lessons: Stay clear of beer bongs. And of this book, too.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59376-123-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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