A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.
A man travels to Australia’s interior plains planning to make a film about the region’s people and culture, but mostly he ruminates in this wry, evocative novel.
This reissue of a work first published in 1982 comes with an introduction by Ben Lerner that includes a nice analysis of Australian writer Murnane’s (Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf, 2016, etc.) often exquisite sentences. There is little in the way of character, action, or plot in this thinking man’s fable. The unnamed narrator comes to an unnamed town on the plains, where he explains himself to plainsmen by telling “a story almost devoid of events or achievements.” He feels the plains are “a place that only I could interpret.” He hangs around in his hotel, where, one day, seven landowners arrive and hold audiences for various petitioners seeking their patronage. When the narrator sees them, the landowners converse in non sequiturs and then one of them offers the narrator a position in his mansion as “Director of Film Projects.” He spends 20 years studying in the library, making notes, mooning over the man's wife and a daughter, and giving occasional progress reports on his film, The Interior. He is praised for his “apparent reluctance to work with camera or projector.” Along the way, he examines such plains phenomena as a decadeslong dispute over whether the true view of the plains is that of the hazy, distant horizon or the rich detail in a patch of ground. Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic, a meld of Buster Keaton, the Kafka of the short stories, and Swift in “A Modest Proposal.” Lerner calls Murnane’s sentences “little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth.” The narrator calls the plains “a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.”
A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925355-90-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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