Not wholly successful, but, still, a significant achievement and a worthy addition to the growing body of contemporary...
A gripping contemporary equivalent of O.E. Rolvaag’s sagas of hard luck on the Great Plains.
Grant Person leaves home shortly after WWII, hoping to escape the guilt he feels about the dead brother who went to war in his place. He works for a time in Atlantic City and then at sea before returning to what is left of his family’s woebegone Montana ranch. His father has vanished; his mother is dead; his brother Max stays long enough to tell Grant he’s leaving, then goes off to New York to paint. Grant finds himself alone with a few hundred head of sheep and some doleful hired hands. Using the money saved from his time at sea, he pays the accumulated debts and tries to make a go of it. Lennon (The Light of the Falling Stars, 1997) beautifully describes the despair his characters feel at their nearly hopeless enterprise, and he renders the boredom of life on the ranch in prose that is both realistic and lyrical. Eventually, Max returns with a girl named Sophia, and they set up housekeeping with Grant. In time, tensions emerge as Grant and Sophia fall tentatively in love. Lennon skillfully integrates these interpersonal conflicts with the protagonists’ larger problem of trying to make the ranch work as a business that will support them all. Sheep get lost and die; the brothers fight, go their separate ways, and then come together in a final trip that ends in a gruesome drowning. The author works hard at his characters, but can’t completely solve the problem of making these inarticulate people plausibly reveal themselves. Nonetheless, few will be unmoved by the sere ending, which finds Grant, aged and alone, the self-appointed curator of his brother’s artistic estate.
Not wholly successful, but, still, a significant achievement and a worthy addition to the growing body of contemporary western literature.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6722-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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