In these handsomely crafted novellas, as in The Age of Grief (1987) and other works, Smiley (The Greenlanders, 1988) sets within the fussy patterns of familial interaction the inexplicable—sudden, volcanic surfacings of rage or desire that transform a seemingly secure life into a new landscape of compromise and sad wisdom. In "Ordinary Love," 52-year-old Rachel, divorced mother of five, grandmother of four, awaits with son Joe the arrival from India of Joe's twin Michael. "An ancient wave of terror," notes Rachel, "seems to unroll from my head downward. . .reunions are fraught with echoes." Twenty years before, Rachel had announced to heartily dominating husband Patrick that she was having an affair with Ed, a novelist and world traveller. In a day or so, Patrick had taken the children away to England, and Rachel's life in the old house with happy children had gone up in smoke. Over the years, children will come home, leave again. Now during this reunion, one of Rachel's children will exhume old griefs—a shocker, matching Rachel's delayed truthtelling about her affair long ago. Her grown-up children, bright, good—and wary—were the recipients, Rachel realizes, of "two of the cruelest gifts. . .the experience of perfect family happiness and the certain knowledge that it could not last." In "Good Will," a 20th-century paradise in Pennsylvania—self-sufficiency on the lushly producing acres of a creatively designed farm with pioneer skills of cloth- and furniture-making—contains a family of three. Yet within the self-assertion of a lively, intelligent, adored young boy lies the serpent of destruction. At the close, paradise lost, his father will accept "fragments" instead of ecosystems of being; good and evil; grief and present new directions; and a time to direct—and a time to step aside from—the inexorable growth of a child. The quiet, even, but never thin narrative voices here pace out the discovery of elusive sad truths—truths that settle in and clarify in the wake of past betrayals by the jagged furies of the ego. Smiley's best to date.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1989
ISBN: 030727909X
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1989
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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