An exceptional character study that still may test some readers' tolerance for unrelievedly religious matter.
A poet, novelist, and biographer tells the story of a pivotal figure from the early days of Christianity.
He was “a small, stumbling, stooped man with a squint,” a Jew and a Roman citizen whose early life was marked by privilege, with tutors and slaves. After a good education, he entered the family tent-making business, but he also took to “ferreting out Jewish heretics” who followed prophets such as the “rustic Nazarene called Jesus.” Then something happened on the road to Damascus, and Saul of Tarsus became Paul, a leading figure of early Christianity. Parini (The Way of Jesus, 2018, etc.), who has written fictional biographies of Tolstoy and Melville, tells the story in sections narrated by Paul or by Luke, author of a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles and companion on Paul’s years of travel throughout Asia, Macedonia, and Greece. Luke is a Greek physician and a willing scribe to Paul as he formulates doctrines, sermons, and letters that will become a dominant voice of the New Testament. They complement each other: Where Paul is passionate and visionary, Luke is measured and skeptical. Parini enlivens a narrative familiar to many with fine scenes and writerly touches, such as “houses white as dice tumbling downhill to the pebble-strewn beach.” He captures the larger politico-religious picture, with Paul as the constant stone in the sandal of Jewish, Christian, and Roman leaders alike, with his drive to shape and spread the message of Jesus sparking doctrinal clashes and threatening a fragile coexistence. The evangelist is beaten and whipped and jailed and remains indomitable. Parini also offers a suggestion of Paul’s homosexuality that is plausible but of questionable relevance. The bigger question is whether all this adds up to a novel—perhaps a holy picaresque.
An exceptional character study that still may test some readers' tolerance for unrelievedly religious matter.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-52278-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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