So immersed is Amdahl in the politics of the era and the philosophical questions at the novel’s core that he too often...
Amid the violent labor struggles of early-20th-century America, the wealthy son of a prominent San Francisco family immerses himself in theater and politics and obsesses over the distinction (or lack thereof) between performance and “real” life.
All the world’s a stage in Amdahl’s (The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts, 2013, etc.) dense, sometimes confounding novel. The bulk of the action takes place in the run-up to America’s entry into World War I. Charles Minot, son of a mover and shaker with connections to Theodore Roosevelt, is staging a production of Henry James’ The American at his family’s theater. Self-serious and insecure, Charles becomes involved with Vera, one of his actresses, and through her dives headfirst into the gritty world of radical labor activists. After Charles’ affiliation with alleged anarchists is revealed in the press, his theater is bombed during a performance. Charles and Vera repair to the Midwest, where they consort with a colorful cast of unionists and their adversaries and revel in the performative nature of “reality.” This obsession with life as theater is provocative, but the idea is explored so often and so pointedly (“He was not free of the necessary falseness of reality, not free of the stage, but wished to be”) that it becomes challenging to invest in the characters. Amdahl’s command of language is powerful, but the emotional payoff isn’t commensurate with the intellectual investment required to appreciate this ambitious novel.
So immersed is Amdahl in the politics of the era and the philosophical questions at the novel’s core that he too often sacrifices clarity for concept.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-629-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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