A wry, mind-bending delight: Borges and Calvino would have welcomed Vila-Matas as a kinsman.
A blocked writer sings the praises of literary failure, in this first English translation from a prizewinning Spanish author.
The unnamed narrator is a hunchbacked, lonely clerical worker and hopeful author, unable to follow up his obscure first book, who takes extended sick leave and vacation time to record instances of self-imposed literary “silence” in “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text.” Said footnotes cite the stalled careers of J.D. Salinger, Herman Melville (who wrote virtually nothing during his last three decades), Henry Roth (who rediscovered his authorial voice only in old age), Socrates (who committed none of his thoughts to paper), and comparatively lesser-known idlers like Swiss miniaturist Robert Walser and Spain’s Felipe Alfau, among others. The narrator analyzes excuses for not writing: illness, alcohol or drug addiction, madness, lack of inspiration, or, simply, rechanneling one’s energies (e.g., Diderot’s contemporary Joseph Joubert, who distributed all his promising premises throughout a vast diary). He also records such parallel cases as those of artist Marcel Duchamp, who forswore painting because of his passion for chess; Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronym” (i.e., fictional alter ego) the Baron of Teive, whose brilliance was never permitted to flower; and a (doubtless fictional) “cyclist who suffered from mood swings and would sometimes forget to finish a race.” Other explicitly fictional do-nothings include the narrator’s writer friend Maria, hamstrung by her fixation on the anti-narrative techniques of French “New Wave” novelists, and “Paranoid Pérez,” who (in a very funny sequence) claims that Nobel laureate José Saramago has stolen all his best ideas. On and on it goes, quite madly and irresistibly. The irony of course is that in dwelling with such intricate metafictional insistence on the impossibility of writing his second book, the narrator has in fact written it.
A wry, mind-bending delight: Borges and Calvino would have welcomed Vila-Matas as a kinsman.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-8112-1591-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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