A poetic meditation on guilt and faith.
A spare allegory of inquisition, miracle and redemption.
While not a historical novel, Davis’s debut is set in a vague, almost mythic past, after the Christian defeat of Muslim rule in the early Renaissance. The author is not interested in immersing us in historic density, however, but rather working by symbol and suggestion. The characters are either unnamed (the narrator) or given allegorical epithets (the Moor, the Inquisitor, the Factor). The narrator begins by recounting, some 70 years after the event, a boyhood memory of his attraction to the Moor, a charismatic acequero who helped teach Christian settlers how to irrigate the harsh, arid and mountainous land they inhabit. The Moor has a wealth of lore and narrative to beguile the village children, but he’s by definition an outsider—he’s also accused of blasphemy after imitating Christ’s miracle of walking on water. An Inquisitor shows up to query the villagers, and eventually a show trial occurs in which the Moor is condemned and shortly thereafter executed. Years after this trauma, the boy still feels guilty of betrayal, for he’s the one person who had intended to remain loyal to the Moor. Meanwhile, true evil shows up in the physically and morally deformed Factor, who is employed by the local monastery and who keeps pet lambs that he periodically sacrifices in a gruesome manner. He kidnaps the narrator and almost turns him into another sacrificial lamb. The novel concludes lyrically with the narrator returning years later to his village—and experiencing a miracle that leads him to realize that “if you choose an existence that lacks illusion and does not convert the clod of being to a thing of wonder and celebration, then you will die before you have ever lived…”
A poetic meditation on guilt and faith.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57962-153-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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