A caustic fantasy about emasculated men, power reversals, proletariat revolution, and extreme violence. Sound familiar?
An uprising in Portland, Oregon, leads to social revolution and terror in this relentless satire of our splintered times.
Many writers have complained recently that current events are distracting them from doing the work. Clearly, Palahniuk (Make Something Up, 2015, etc.) has embraced the madness, crafting a dystopian nightmare that takes all the fractures of our modern society and escalates them to a perverted climax. The United States is on the brink of war, and millennials are expected to be mowed down by the thousands, a deliberate plan by a crooked senator to avoid an American Arab Spring. But two new developments emerge. The first is The List, an internet site where anyone can post the names of people they deem a threat to society. The more votes a person gets, the more danger they are in. The second is a revolutionary manifesto by a man named Talbott Reynolds that contains wisdom like “We must kill those who would have us kill one another” and is advertised with the slogan "A Smile Is Your Best Bulletproof Vest!" And then...Adjustment Day, during which The List’s targets are exterminated, journalists murdered, and a “Declaration of Interdependence” setting new rules is written. Only those who killed are granted rights. They are elevated to the rank of barbaric “chieftains,” their serfs marked by a severed ear. The country is split into divided states: “Blacktopia,” “Gaysia,” and “Caucasia.” “Democracy was a short-lived aberration,” Palahniuk writes, taking the anarchist conviction of Fight Club (1996) Project Mayhem and letting it run unchecked. Once Palahniuk turns society on its ear, it’s a rich milieu in which the author can experiment with characters, form, style, and an acidic wit that savages social constructs, conspiracies, and norms with abandon. Or, perhaps not. “Palahniuk,” Reynolds mutters. “All of his work is about castration. Castration or abortion.”
A caustic fantasy about emasculated men, power reversals, proletariat revolution, and extreme violence. Sound familiar?Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65259-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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