Two narratives of frustrated possibility, offering an awareness of the brutal indifference of modern life.
Amdahl (stories: Visigoth, 2006) examines darkly ludicrous aspects of modern American culture in two novellas.
The first novella, “I Am Death, or, Bartleby the Mobster,” introduces us to a journalist named Jack, author of a monthly column called The Meaning of Life. Jack is contacted by George Swanson, a lawyer for brutal mobster Frank Fini. It seems that Fini, in a spasm of consciousness about his own dwindling mortality, wants Jack to ghostwrite Fini’s memoirs, to be called A Boy’s First Book of Mobsters. Jack is convinced he can write “not…some mock-sophisticated infotainment for a global media empire, but rather a very great and timeless book.” Meanwhile, Swanson speaks as though he’s ingested Sam Fuller movies (“Look, do us a favor and yourself one in the process and don’t get wise, all right?”), and, except for chain-smoking, Fini remains in a state of almost perpetual catatonia. “Peasants,” the second and longer novella, introduces us to the hapless Walter Rasmussen, currently in a state of ill health because of various petty betrayals and office politics involving a project he’s trying to run for the World Summit for Sustainable Development. Amdahl is not so much interested in the project itself as in how it brings out conflict in the strange and non-adaptive personalities involved with it. These include Cage (named after the avant-garde composer), who “wore his hair long and his beard full because, he said, that was what men looked like in nature,” and Jessica, to whom Rasmussen feels attracted but who’s turned off by her “shriek[ing] and wail[ing]” at a Jimmy Buffett concert “like men who have won ATVs on game shows.”
Two narratives of frustrated possibility, offering an awareness of the brutal indifference of modern life.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57131-071-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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