As a writer, Kerouac is becoming more and more like the sad sack who missed the turn-off on the thruway and must now seemingly go on and on until he hits the next one. This, his latest "written on the run" remembrance, celebrates the short, sad, happy, holy life of Gerard, a brother who died from rheumatic fever at the age of 9 when Kerouac was 4. A sort of Alyosha-in-knickers, Gerard in his "little high crazycat voice" warned Jack to be kind to animals and took him "by the hand on forgotten little walks". Jack now draws "breath to tell his pain-tale for the world that needs his soft and loving like". Gerard plays with cats, birds, bubblegum cards; he goes on piggyback rides and to confession; once or twice he sees the Virgin. After the funeral, Jack concludes that life is a "vast ethereal movie, I'm an extra and Gerard is the hero and God is directing it from Heaven".... Well, what does it amount to? On one level, a book of boyhood beatitudes with a corner of Lowell, Massachusetts in the early '20's sorving as a backdrop. On another, some very contemporary concerns are represented: the search for and/or return to innocence (e.g. Salinger and his "brother" Seymour); the selfless ideal of Zen; and above all, an artistic credo. Ironically enough, nothing in Visions is as on-the-level and lovely as a comment Jack made a few years back: "After my brother died, when I was 4, they tell me I began to sit motionlessly in the parlor, pale and thin, and after a few months of sorrow began to play the old Victrola and act out movies to the music". At that time, Kerouac was the white hope of our world. May he become so again. And may he find the turn-off on the thruway.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0140144528
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Co
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1936
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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