Many will fade early—and miss the immensely funny, weird-ass, bottom-dog East Texas dialogue that carries us over the dense...
Horror whose joys enter from the eye’s edge, demanding, Read me twice, read me twice.
As page five tells, etymologically eschatology, or the study of last things, means to read schat—which is why the expletive “shit” litters these pages. Searcy’s debut, Ordinary Horror (2001), asked for a patient reader, one who could strip each phrase for the riddle beneath. Nothing has changed. The only true way to review Searcy is to quote him at length and let him either sell or hang himself, since his writing offers mandarin hardships not all wish to face. Even so, here is the plot, seen through a page darkly: Revelation is coming to East Texas, the biblical revelation, although the gorgeous symbolism of Revelations is easier to follow than Searcy’s darting shadows. Weird scarecrows, if that’s what they are, pop up all over Sulphur Springs. Luther (“Oh shit”) Hazlitt comes home to his banged-up trailer, finds his cattle fled, puppies gone, power out, fridge warm, dead chicken in the yard, and a set of clothes hanging from a tree as if the owner had been jerked out of them. His chow bites him on the forearm. His graying girlfriend Agnes tells him they’re getting baseball hail in Sulphur Springs. Sheriff Bobby shows off his biblical Leviathan, a 300-pound catfish, at Joe’s Big Juicy Hamburger Restaurant. Crazy humid weather gets people to praying in the streets, talking about Last Things—the Rapture! More animals die. A child disappears. Something lurks about Luther’s henhouse and trailer, so Luther builds a big trap to catch it. Can it be the Holy Spirit? Then Sheriff Bobby gets messily, fatally cut up—by whom? And when the trap fails, Luther turns his trailer into a really big spring-hinged trap. As with Ordinary Horror, Searcy’s climax has its hints but will leave most readers hanging. What? What?
Many will fade early—and miss the immensely funny, weird-ass, bottom-dog East Texas dialogue that carries us over the dense prose.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03132-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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