An astonishing alchemy of history, romance, and fable.
Fractured hearts, ruined lives, shattered dreams—only the art of storytelling can hope to heal these in war-ravaged Latvia.
The difficulties of forgiveness lie at the heart of this beautifully spun tale. Inara lies on her deathbed, telling her son, Maris, the stories of their family, their village, and Latvian history in hopes that in the telling, the truth will be preserved. During the Soviet invasion of Latvia, Maris’ paternal great-grandfather, Oskars, had been found with a Bible. Consequently banished to Siberia along with his wife and son, Oskars taught his son, Eriks, the family business: gravedigging. Similarly, Maris’ maternal great-grandfather, Ferdinands, had been sent away to a work camp, and his wife, Velta, had written letters, such gorgeous letters, to him. Between mushroom hunting and fishing, Inara and her brother help keep the household afloat, yet they sneak off to search for Velta’s letters, rumored to be hidden in the walls of the family’s abandoned manor house. The neighbors, the Ilmyen family, are Jewish chess masters, and they fascinate Inara, who can only hope to approximate the romantic suffering of their lives. The Zetsches, a German-Latvian couple, begin snapping up all the prime property in town, including the cemetery. Ochsner (The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, 2010, etc.) bewitches the reader with layer upon layer of spellbinding storytelling: Velta’s letters burst with folk tales and fables; Uncle Maris’ fabulous inventions—from sloth-prevention bracelets to foul-tasting vitality elixirs—pale in comparison with his colorful insults, slung at Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians; Inara’s own dreams are populated with drowned ghost girls, her fishing expeditions haunted by magical eels. Maris himself, like the uncle he was named for, sports enormous furry ears, the better to hear not only the whispers of the buried, but also the true heartaches lurking beneath his mother’s confessions.
An astonishing alchemy of history, romance, and fable.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-25321-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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