Sparkling, facetious, and entertaining.
In these 22 stories, South African writer Vladislavic employs tones ranging from surreal absurdity to meditative wit as he delves into themes of isolation, racism, and politics.
This volume collects two separate story collections published earlier in South Africa: Missing Persons (1989) and Propaganda by Monuments (1996). The 11 stories of the first book are suffused with humor, both absurd and surreal. In “Journal of a Wall,” the narrator chronicles the building of a wall over a six-month period, finding himself alternately fascinated, obsessed, or even tormented as he spies on the bricklayer creating this barrier. And as in all “wall” narratives, one of the themes readers are asked to contemplate is what’s being walled out—and what’s being walled in? Kafka would feel at home in a number of the stories here. In “The Box,” for example, the narrator reaches through the screen of a television set and grabs the diminutive figure of a prime minister, who is kept in a cage, fed, and watered in a spare room. The title of “When My Hands Burst into Flames” says it all—this phenomenon is presented as both fantastical and routine, though by the end of the story the narrator begins to relish the destructive power that has been unleashed: “Later I think I will torch the park across the street. Meanwhile, I am content to play with fire.” The stories in Propaganda by Monuments are more realistic but equally witty. One of the best is the title story, which is laugh-out-loud funny. Pavel Grekov, a Russian translator, has gotten a letter from Boniface Khumalo, a South African who has “pedestals galore” and wishes to acquire a statue of Lenin. Known for his “command of a fractious and somewhat eccentric English vocabulary,” Grekov reassures Khumalo that he’s “overwhelmingly cocksure that your request re: SURPLUS STATUE will meet with a big okey-dokey fairly forthwith.”
Sparkling, facetious, and entertaining.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-11-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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