This ought to have been a very moving story; instead, it’s an opportunity wasted.
A father’s experience of raising a son burdened with severe birth defects is, and isn’t, the subject of this curiously uninvolving novel, a prizewinner from a popular veteran Italian writer.
The narrator, identified only as Frigerio, is a schoolteacher whose relationships with his stoical younger wife Franca and their afflicted son Paolo seem little more than occasions for (the somewhat “frigid”?) Frigerio’s observations on disability, family solidarity (or the lack of it), and the vulnerability felt by people brought thus closely into contact with disability and enervation. The tale is awfully static, and stabs at drama made by Frigerio’s meetings with various family, acquaintances, and representatives of medical and educational establishments generally fall flat because Pontiggia does not persuade us that his characters could possibly be as self-absorbed and heartless as they’re here depicted (Frigerio’s mistress sums up his situation thus: “I’m amazed by how much you’ve hidden from me!”; a school psychologist admonishes “You want to protect your son too much . . . . Life is all about risks!”). A series of bland, unshaped brief scenes that all but eschew characterization cohere only into a generalized summary that reads like a self-help manual. The theme of the “new birth” experienced by families of brain-damaged children is left almost totally undeveloped. There’s potential drama in Frigerio’s vacillations among compassion, despair, resentment, and anger (if only he seemed real to us)—and even more in Paolo’s sweetly distracted demeanor, which includes a very real awareness of how he is “different” from others. But Paolo’s presence barely registers until the latter chapters, by which time the reader has grown impatient with Pontiggia’s circuitous, discursive treatment of a subject that cries our for immediacy and specificity.
This ought to have been a very moving story; instead, it’s an opportunity wasted.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41310-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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