Original and thought-provoking.
The always intriguing Diski (Skating to Antarctica, 1998, etc.) retells the Old Testament of Sarah and Abraham, creating both a moving love story and a postmodern exploration of the idea of narration.
Child of an unnamed concubine and Abraham’s father, Sarah is raised in the respectable house of Shem as a beloved sister. The family consists of prosperous craftsmen, fashioning idols of the various gods worshipped in the city of Ur. Even as a child Sarah loves Abraham, trailing after him in the pesky, devoted custom of a younger sibling. Then, when she’s 13, tragedy strikes: Abraham’s brother desecrates a temple and commits suicide, forcing his shunned family to move through the desert in search of a place that hasn’t heard of their shame. While in the desert the father makes a daring decision: Sarah and Abraham must marry to continue the family line. They have a long, happy union but no children. It is then that God speaks to Abraham, promising the impossible: children through which a nation will be born. Throughout Sarah’s story, the voice of God interrupts—although, as He points out, He is The Word, so there is no narrative that is not His own. These forays into divine elevate a simple revisionist tale to a truly bold exploration of the character of God. The great I AM from which everything comes, God tells of his first mistake, the unforeseen invention of an “us” (Adam and Eve): it’s a mistake that sets Him forever apart from His creation. An “us” doesn’t need an I AM, and the human invention of love, something He never imagined, further alienates master from man and woman. God tries to start over with Noah, but it doesn’t really work, so He then sets His sights on stolid, dutiful Abraham’s love. But there’s a powerful obstacle: the love already existing between a very human “us”—Sarah and Abraham.
Original and thought-provoking.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28054-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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