Cates’s world is futuristic in tone yet based on our very own world today, in a witty, skillful, amusing—and unrelentingly...
A little slip of a tale in the manner of Voltaire’s Candide—which, like its prototype, puts tongue in cheek and takes on nothing less than the state of the nation and the state of the world.
And neither, ruled by the free market, is in good shape. Named “X,” our hero is a man experienced in the building trades (he has a public radio show on home repair) whose life is ruined when a tornado sweeps his house away and the nearby house of the woman (called “C”—as in Cunégonde?) he’s just fallen head-over-heels for. Not only does the shark insurance company renege, leaving X in penury, but the gorgeous C (an entrepreneur of some mysterious kind) has also disappeared entirely. And so X, like Candide, travels the world to find her. With a sullen young man and a woman in a pink lamé dress (they meet in a bar), he sets out by car across the Wonderlandian desert, picks up two hitchhikers who are felons on the lam: They shoot the sullen boy in the head, throw him from the moving car, then, at the border, get X and the woman in pink thrown in jail as “terrorists.” To recite more would be to follow knots on a string as adventure follows adventure. X and the woman become rich beyond measure, fall into craven poverty and are separated. There follow the slave labor of X (in a shoelace factory owned by none other than—C!); military servitude; escape to an edenic land (á la El Dorado) across the mountains (where the sullen boy reappears, not dead); return to the tormented Wonderland, spiritually crushed under “miracle of market expansion”; reunion with the woman in pink, who is gang-raped like the Old Woman in Candide; and so on—and on.
Cates’s world is futuristic in tone yet based on our very own world today, in a witty, skillful, amusing—and unrelentingly clear-eyed—satire.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-58642-095-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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