Incest is luridly limned in this over-the-top first novel that’s more country kookster—lots of critters and wacky grandmas—than a serious take on a troubling subject. Presumably, the story told by narrator Josey Rose should engage and alarm, but it never does: The writing is too uneven, the plot too overwrought, and the characters more suited to a Beverly Hillbillies noir sitcom. After a melodramatic prologue, Josey begins his story in 1960, the year he was 11. Believing his mother to be dead, Josey lives with his father and Grandma Ru, who worries about space flights and glues pictures of thermostats into scrapbooks. Josey’s father links the steel beams for high-rises and as a hobby builds delicate models of ships in bottles, but when he drinks he gets mean—enough so that he not only destroys all his models and beats up on Josey, but then heads out to a deconsecrated chapel deep in the woods. It’s there one night that Josey sees his father there rape a beautiful young woman whom he learns later, visiting her himself, to be his cousin Lily. She wears strange clothes, fears the sun, at 13 had a baby—a son who reportedly died—and sculpts fungi gathered after dark. Josey’s smitten by Lily and as he grows older he tries to protect her, but drunken Dad, more a concept than a real character, chokes Grandma to death before the traumatized young woman, then hospitalizes her to keep his secret safe. The adult Josey springs Lily from hospital, after which they live together as lovers. When Lily tells Josey that his mother isn—t dead, a reunion with Mom complicates his life further: after she tells him the truth about Lily, his father, and himself, a confrontation ends in another death. But whatever the truth, Josey decides to stick with Lily. Underwhelming excess.
Pub Date: June 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83791-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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