A roman Ö clef distinguished, so to speak, by feet of the samenot to mention other bodily parts lubriciously (if not lovingly) described. It's the first-person confession of a Mexican novelist who in all essentials resembles and is in no way distinguished from Carlos Fuentes (The Orange Tree, 1994, etc.). On New Year's Eve, 1968, then in his 40s, the novelist meets and falls helplessly in love with Diana Soren, a mercurial American film actress who began her career as an untrained ingÇnue playing Joan of Arc and followed that performance with one in a famous French New Wave melodramain other words, an unmistakable simulacrum of the late Jean Seberg. She takes Protagonist/Fuentes (hereafter, P/F) to her bed; impatiently endures his unwillingness to remain constantly at her beck and call (P/F is a dedicated novelist, after all); answers his guilt about not acting as the literary voice of his country with her own reservations about having portrayed a saint; and abandons him for higher causes and other lovers, including, most notably, the unnamed "leader of the Black Panthers." Other less fortunate notables, who are evoked or appear either as themselves or in thinly fictionalized disguise, include Seberg's husband, French novelist Romain Gary (here named Ivan Gravet); actors Lee J. Cobb and Clint Eastwood; filmmaker Luis Bunuel; novelists James Baldwin and William Styron; and even Tina Turner. Dead or alive, all should sue. The novel is a maudlin, exploitative exercise in self- absorption, redeemed only by a few edgy pages in which P/F frets more or less candidly about "the separation between the vital content of things and their literary expression in my work." Even so, P/F underestimates. Nowhere in Fuentes's otherwise respectable oeuvre is there evidence of such slackness, shapelessness, andlet's face itshamelessness. A peculiarly ungallant and unnecessary book. And unless it's simply a makeweight being used to fulfill a contractual obligation, it's hard to understand why Fuentes allowed it to be published.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-13903-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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