Using the hundred simple words of a word-association test as starting points for its hundred chapters, Canadian Schoemperlen's debut novel demonstrates why it's probably better to avoid such gimmicks altogether—here, a hundred brilliantly written separate episodes turn into one long and sadly stagnant narrative. The story centers on the life and memories of Joanna, a young woman who lives in an unspecified city in southeastern Ontario. An only child, Joanna grew up waiting for the time when she could escape her parents, bitter Esther and ineffectual Clarence, escape her childhood home with its plaid dinner plates and gold-flecked table, and begin to make her own life as an artist. When she finally does leave home, she stumbles through a couple of unsatisfactory relationships—first with Henry, who's something of a loser; then with Lewis, who's married—before she settles down with steady Gordon and gives birth to baby Samuel. These are the simple facts, and the trouble is we've learned them all by the end of the first chapter. The next 99 circle back over the same territory, adding description (Henry had smelly feet; Lewis's wife, Wanda, still sucks her thumb), filling in detail (how Joanna lost her virginity; what Samuel's birth was like), and pondering the still unanswered and unanswerable questions—what, for example, turned Esther into such an unhappy woman? Schoemperlen knows all the right questions to ask, her writing is wonderfully evocative and true, and the materials for Joanna's story are all here—but the story itself gives up and collapses on its own flat surface. With no forward momentum, the circle of events becomes like one of those dreams in which you can never get where you want to go- -powerful, sure, but endless. Better in pieces than as a whole: bright shards from a promising writer who shouldn't be afraid to hammer together a real structure next time. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86517-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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