A fanciful story layered in symbolism and ripe with lyrical language.
Wallace (Big Fish, 2001, etc.) spins another mythical tale about love and family.
Helen and Rachel are great-grandchildren of Elijah McCallister, who carved the town of Roam out of the wilderness, a town built around the manufacture of silk, a fabric he discovered for himself after landing in China as a sailor. Elijah succeeded through theft and monomania. He kidnapped Ming Kai, a peddler who knew the secrets of silkworms and mulberry trees, and brought him to America. "We'll be rich," he tells him and promises to bring Ming’s family from China. Instead, Elijah provided Ming with a "replacement family." Roam prospered and then faded, leaving Helen and Rachel the last McCallisters. Rachel is beautiful and blind. Helen is older, "ugly from the day she was born." The girls’ parents are killed. Helen becomes Rachel’s caretaker, sharing Elijah’s mansion, "recklessly beautiful, the largely uninhabitable manifestation of the mind of a madman." There, Helen has "covered every mirror in the house with old grocery sacks," persuaded Rachel that she is the ugly one and imprisoned her with fantasies of flesh-eating birds and bottomless ravines. What transpires thereafter is a tale of love, magic and reconciliation, a tale populated by scarred and distorted characters: whites, Chinese and "combos." The narrative’s catalyst comes when Rachel runs away, intent on proving her independence.
A fanciful story layered in symbolism and ripe with lyrical language.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0397-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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