In his ambitious new version of an ancient classic, Vann sacrifices clarity for lyricism but falls short of both.
A retelling of the story of Medea and her exploits with Jason and the Argonauts.
Vann’s (Aquarium, 2015, etc.) newest work traverses well-trod territory: he’s taken Medea as his subject, the mythological character famous for, among other things, murdering her own children. Actually, the circumstances of those murders vary widely among the numerous ancient accounts. Maybe she hadn’t meant to kill them; maybe it was an accident; etc., etc. Vann manages to make the story his own. His book begins long before that infamous conclusion, with Medea’s flight from her homeland with Jason, seeker of the Golden Fleece, and his men, the Argonauts. Then there is their perilous journey back to Iolcus, where Jason’s cruel uncle, Pelias, is king. In Vann’s telling, Jason is too weak to usurp the throne, despite Medea’s urging, and the two end up enslaved for the next six years. There are other adventures, too, all of which are filtered through Medea’s singular consciousness. She’s prone to spectacular acts of violence. Before the book even begins, she’s hacked her brother to pieces. Vann relates all this in a prose style that aims for lyricism but rather quickly falls short of it. There’s a sameness to his sentences, an odd reluctance to use the verb “to be,” that quickly becomes tiresome. You long for a complete sentence. The fragments stack up: “White glare each morning an oblivion. Distance gone. Shape and shadow and being. Eyes without use, and this water an open desert with no refuge.” Unfortunately, Vann, a former Guggenheim fellow, is not at his best here. His fragments are interspersed with bits of dialogue that at times sound suspiciously contemporary: “Anyway,” Jason says to Medea at one point. “Leave me alone.” Soon after, brimful with rage and the desire for revenge, she thinks, “she will give him plenty to remember.”
In his ambitious new version of an ancient classic, Vann sacrifices clarity for lyricism but falls short of both.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2580-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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