A persuasive, witty exploration of a tough and unconventional young woman—and a consistently lively account of the...
White South African writer Rose-Innes makes her American debut with a nimble, intriguing novel about a second-generation Cape Town exterminator—er, ethical pest-removal specialist.
As founder/proprietor of Painless Pest Relocations, Katya Grubbs—accompanied by her teenage nephew, Toby—spends her days as a kind of interspecies border-control officer, watching for encroaching animals that stray from "their" territory into the luxury homes and groomed, gated developments of the city. She traps and then offloads a wide variety of unwanted—"unloved and unlovely"—critters: caterpillars, frogs, snakes, roaches, mongooses, and more. Early on in the novel, she's hired to remove a mysterious plague of mud-swarming beetles from Nineveh, a swanky coastal development, reclaimed from wetlands, that is languishing in a state of near completion until the "goggas" can be dispatched. Her boss is a shady but colorful Afrikaans developer named Brand, who informs her that she' s replacing an exterminator with whom he had a falling-out—Katya's own estranged father, Len, who, colorful and shady himself, bears a certain resemblance to her employer. To gauge the extent of the infestation, Katya needs to spend a few days at Nineveh, and her investigations there reveal little by way of animal interlopers, initially—she's told the beetles show up after a rain, and the weather's been dry—but in the meantime she makes some discoveries about the development, which appears to be disappearing fixture by fixture, tile by tile, despite the presence of on-site security; a scavenger economy thrives in the seething-with-life wetlands just beyond the walls. And then, not quite to Katya's surprise, Len—another specimen out of place, it would seem—shows up.
A persuasive, witty exploration of a tough and unconventional young woman—and a consistently lively account of the entanglements of cultural politics, class, and architecture in contemporary South Africa.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-97-2
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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