A Lawrentian richness of event and language mark this final novel by Lash (From May to October, 1981, etc.), who died in 1993. Here, as in Lash’s five other novels, is a fascination with the often painful and always complex dynamics of family life and the ways families can both damn and save people. Dominating the story is the flinty, Anglo-Irish, intensely proper Violet Farr, who lives with her odd, diffident husband Cecil in Tipperary, where she struggles to keep up appearances and maintain a ramshackle Mansion. Violet tolerates Cecil’s presence as long as he makes few demands (“the hall barometer was his only real possession”) and keeps his homosexuality hidden. Unsurprisingly, their son Lumsden, the result of an infrequent coupling, is a disappointment to Violet, both too needy and too quietly defiant. He’s sent off to boarding school, and when he returns home at age 17, it’s no great shock to Violet that he has an uncontrolled taste for alcohol and a suspiciously intense interest in younger girls. Uncovered in compromising circumstances by the local priest (himself uncomfortably aroused by what he witnesses), Lumsden is packed off for good, and for some years Violet’s rigidly plotted life follows its usual course—until it’s disrupted and then altered forever by the arrival of eight-year-old Spencer, the profoundly unhappy offspring of Lumsden and a hapless barmaid. Violet suspects the worst—Spencer is, after all, his father’s child—and when circumstances suggest his guilt in a disturbing incident, she banishes him just as she had his father. Tragedy follows, but, thanks to the efforts of some benign strangers, Spencer does gain a slender chance at happiness. Lash’s determination to plumb the wayward psychology of her characters, and her belief in the pitiless influence of will and appetite on life, turn an otherwise unsurprising story into something strange and unsettling. Some may find the language rich and at times too hectic, but the power and originality of Lash’s vision overrides the occasional rough spots.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1998
ISBN: 1-58234-003-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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