A keenly observed but rather lifeless portrait. So little happens that it’s difficult to stay involved, let alone...
An impressionistic debut about a young Japanese pearl diver who is sent to a leper colony.
Nowadays considered primarily a disease of the tropics (where it has become increasingly rare), leprosy was a global scourge until quite recently: Talarigo’s story takes place on an island leprosarium off the coast of Japan in the years following WWII. Here, sealed off from all contact with the outside world, the confirmed cases are sent to begin their lives anew under the most terrible circumstances imaginable. The 19-year-old pearl diver who arrives in 1948 and takes the name Miss Fuji (all lepers in Japan at this time are declared legally dead and required to assume new identities in the colony) has only a mild case of leprosy, but she is disowned by her family all the same and committed to the island for life. There, she becomes a medical assistant in the clinic, a place that offers little more than massages (or abortions) by way of treatment. The tale is told in episodic vignettes that move lightly back and forth among the various patients and administrators. We meet Miss Min, a storyteller; Mr. Shirayam, a gardener; Miss Morikowa, a Christian; Mr. Nogami, a Communist; Mr. Oyama, an urn painter; and the pregnant Miss Matsu (who wants, against all regulations, to keep her baby). The dreadful background of Miss Fuji’s hopelessness is, if anything, intensified by the advent of new drugs capable of containing or reversing the disease—and by the stubborn refusal of the national health officials to authorize the discharge of arrested cases (like Miss Fuji’s) back to normal society. Her sense of isolation is made even worse by her ability, as a diver, to swim across the straits to the mainland whenever she wants to.
A keenly observed but rather lifeless portrait. So little happens that it’s difficult to stay involved, let alone interested, throughout the whole.Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51051-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
