A straightforward narrative might not have been exciting, but it could have delivered a real epic instead of this fitfully...
In a last-ditch effort to make an impression, or sum up his life, a high-school teacher of Cuban descent gives his class an unforgettable series of lessons.
Carrillo’s debut has an unsurprising tendency to shoot for the moon, or, missing that, to aim for Saturn or even farther out. His mouthpiece, Óscar Dellosantos, teaches at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. On the verge of being dismissed for an unknown infraction—there was some nasty graffiti about him in the boys’ room—Óscar decides to take his truculent class of mostly Cuban students on a movable feast that mixes his own rather rebellious take on their history lessons with an emotional account of his family’s lives in Cuba and America. To be sure, the author is more interested in Óscar’s personal history than in the incorrectly slanted view taken by the textbooks on Cuba and Cuban-American relations. And the personal history here is, indeed, a hyperbolic storm. A couple of crucial events are returned to time and again, like the occasion when Óscar’s relative Amá, always a bit flamboyant and now verging on Alzheimer’s, tried to burn down her own apartment, and also the time the Santiago boy fell through a hole in the ice. Little is ever completely explained in Óscar’s monologues, which loop around, ahead of, and back to his stories in a warm rush of funny, embittered Spanglish that combines the fatalism of the permanent outsider (Cubans being a minority even within Chicago’s Hispanic community) with the devil-may-care attitude of someone about to walk off a cliff. If a criticism had to be made, it’s that Carrillo lets the language—a powerful and passionate tool in his hands—overtake the story to the point of obscuring some more interesting details.
A straightforward narrative might not have been exciting, but it could have delivered a real epic instead of this fitfully insightful but ultimately hermetic tale.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42319-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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