A bleak, searing and sad portrait of outcasts.
Abani’s latest (Graceland, 2004, etc.) follows a California muralist’s search for himself.
Black lives on the skids in South Central L.A. He paints in a “spaceship” he’s constructed on the roof of The Ugly Store, a forlorn artists’ space directed by a Jewish psychic with metal rings in her back. His work-in-progress is a portrait of himself as the Virgin of Guadalupe in a wedding dress. Black drives a dilapidated Volkswagen bus and smokes a lot of dope. He admits to his successful friend Bomboy, a Rwandan businessman, that he lacks the requisite ambition to get anywhere. In his mid-30s, he’s still troubled by ghosts from his past. His Nigerian-born father, a postdoctoral engineering student at Caltech working for NASA, was drafted and killed in Vietnam when Black was very young. His pious Salvadoran mother forced him to pray to the Virgin for his sins; later, dying of cancer, she was convinced she was being punished for getting pregnant out of wedlock. Shortly before her death, Black found a letter from his father explaining that because an evil spirit threatened to kill all male offspring of his Igbo family by age six, Black had been dressed as a girl until he turned seven. This might explain his conflicted sexuality—he’s obsessed with a transvestite stripper named Sweet Girl—and perhaps the voices in his head; he imagines that the angel Gabriel talks to him from time to time. Black hovers precariously on a kind of sexual abyss, unsure where he fits in. Is he homosexual? Does he really want to be a woman? He’s not the only one grappling with childhood wounds; all of Abani’s characters are scarred in some manner.
A bleak, searing and sad portrait of outcasts.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2007
ISBN: 0-14-303877-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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