Kind of like if Office Space ended with scenes from the Kevin Costner vehicle Mr. Brooks.
An entertaining, if slightly disappointing, debut.
The setting is an office. The goods and/or services provided by the company depicted are never defined, but, clearly, business is not good. There have been firings. Using the first-person plural, Park creates a kind of collective narrator to explore the lives of employees still clinging to their jobs. The use of the first-person plural is a bold, distinctive choice, driving home the point that office jobs have the capacity to render the individual irrelevant, but it would have looked a little bolder and a whole lot more distinctive if Joshua Ferris hadn’t done exactly the same thing in the National Book Award finalist Then We Came to the End (2007). The two novels are not—despite several notable similarities—quite as indistinguishable. Park’s assay is shorter, for one thing, and it closes with a 40-plus page sentence (presented in the form of a letter). This passage is easier to read than one might expect: Park ends his tale of commonplace drudgery by turning it into an office thriller. Dark secrets are revealed, nefarious plots foiled. The ending is both gripping and disappointing. Park is very good at capturing the frustrations, fears and small pleasures flourishing amid the cubicles. His office-party vignettes, meditations on Microsoft products and depictions of people who are trying to retain their humanity in an environment which makes them interchangeable coalesce into a touching, funny group portrait of corporate underlings everywhere. He undermines this accomplishment, though, when he gives his story a villain—an evil madman, no less—rather than letting the bad guy be the office itself.
Kind of like if Office Space ended with scenes from the Kevin Costner vehicle Mr. Brooks.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7857-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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