Elements of the narrative loop and repeat, not always successfully, but at its best and most ambitious, this is a novel...
Korean short story writer Yujoo's debut novel paints a brutal picture of childhood within a metafictional frame.
In "an ordinary residential area in a city outside Seoul" in 1998, two 12-year-old girls keep journals for their school assignment. One, described as "lucky," has 72 German watercolor pencils and a sweater with a deer on it. Her name is Mia. The other, "simply luckless," carries scars and bruises beneath her clothes and is referred to starkly as the Child; "she forces the stinging, burning pain aside by creating greater pain." Their classmates practice acts of casual sadism and play "the fainting game" at the back of the classroom, choking each other. "The children exchange meaningful, significant looks, but there is neither meaning nor significance here....They merely tear the wings off butterflies, they merely kill chicks." Something compels the Child to break in after school hours and add sentences such as "I hate you," "I want to kill, too," to the journals of her classmates. Bewildered and disturbed, the teacher threatens to involve the police, spooking the perpetrator into trying to cover her tracks. The resultant tragedy, heavily foreshadowed, has a grim inevitability; "There is no sentence that can save you." But the ponderousness distances the reader from an emotional involvement in the characters' lives. In the second section the book becomes increasingly self-referential: "I can package a certain story as a dream and tell it that way. I can disguise my childhood, and as I disguise it I can make allusions, and as I reveal details about the allusions, I can make them appear fictitious, and in this way, I can deceive you all." The fictional Child returns to the author/narrator to re-enact a pivotal scene. "Am I alive or am I dead?" her character asks.
Elements of the narrative loop and repeat, not always successfully, but at its best and most ambitious, this is a novel about language and stories and the power of the written word.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-766-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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