A gentle fable about the mystery of artistic creativity.
A strange encounter with the natural world ignites an artist’s career.
On an English beach one otherwise unremarkable day in June 1976, Ray Eccles is struck on the head by a plummeting sea gull. That mishap inexplicably transforms the furloughed local government photocopy machine operator, so desperate for stimulation he believes an unexploded bomb beneath the sand “might be good company,” into an acclaimed artist, obsessed with capturing, in a series of portraits all entitled “She,” the image of the unknown woman who was the sole witness to the startling event that triggers his metamorphosis. Paige’s slim debut novel is the elegiac story of the enigmatic Ray and the handful of characters who gravitate to his equally mysterious work. They include George and Grace Zoob, sophisticated collectors of outsider art, who discover Ray’s “intimate, magical and strange” painting when he’s first producing it only on the walls of his small home in Southend-on-Sea, using everything from food to his own blood and semen; their daughter, Mira; and Jennifer Mulholland, Ray's inadvertent muse, who’s trapped in a companionable but sterile marriage, her quiet despair only deepened by the memory of the moment her life collided with Ray's at the seaside. Whether it’s Grace, who “felt herself being filled in, fashioned anew, a second, truer skin knitting itself around her like a healing wound” as she models for Ray, or Jennifer, aching with the realization, when she reflects on her long union, that “the longer they were married the less they knew each other,” Paige exercises impressive restraint in her emotionally precise portrait of ordinary people groping for something extraordinary to fill a hole in their lives. Only some of the novel’s principal characters even approach that goal, but as Paige depicts it in a moving climax at London’s Tate Modern gallery, great art can serve as a “direct, sensuous response to the world” that’s not only pleasing to the eye, but also profoundly engaging to the heart.
A gentle fable about the mystery of artistic creativity.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-239-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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