Bernheim's third novel (and first to appear here), a spare little wisp of a thing, won the 1993 Prix MÇdicis. Claire is a doctor who lives in one room of a tiny Paris apartment while using the other for seeing patients. When her stolen purse is recovered (and brought to her door) by attractive construction-worker Thomas Kovacs, Claire's previous lover goes out the door and new romance springs to life. Unfortunately, Thomas is married to an architect wife and also has kids, yet every day he comes over to Claire's after she's done seeing her patients, staying for exactly an hour and a quarter so as not to raise suspicions at home. The lovers, Bernheim mentions, were luckily ``almost the same height,'' so that, in lovemaking, ``from their toes to their foreheads, Thomas was glued to Claire, and Claire was glued to Thomas'' (elsewhere, Thomas ``was breathing Claire's breath. And he was drinking her saliva''). As ever, a love affair is interesting to the extent that the people in it are interesting, but one learns little more of Thomas than that he eats meat, has good digestion, and takes sugar with his coffee. Claire, meanwhile, tries vainly to imagine his family life (he's not talking) while she saves, in a desk drawer, four sugar cubes as mementos of coffees together, along with Thomas's daily discarded condom wrappers (not to mention his first used condom itself). One can imagine her happy surprise when, after three months or so, Thomas comes out from a long stay in the bathroom one day and announces- -voilÖ—that he doesn't have kids and isn't really married after all. Happiness! Claire successfully treats a patient for hepatitis as story ends, and the future looks up. Some pleasant details and Parisian atmospherics, but otherwise thin, motiveless, and unpeopled to the point of a pretentious nothingness. Tiny and inexplicably silly.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85811-0
Page Count: 119
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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