Music critic Fusilli’s debut is high-minded and drenched in atmosphere, with long, looping descriptions of night, the city,...
There’s no obvious way to recover after a madman throws your infant son on the subway tracks and your wife perishes as well in her attempt to save him. Novelist Terry Orr finds the talking cure less effective than writing letters to his late wife, famous painter Marina Fiorentino, and taking on some pro bono work as a private eye. And there’s no shortage of work to be done. While he’s out jogging on Little West 12th Street, Terry finds the body of cabdriver Aubrey Brown, beaten to death with his own steering-wheel lock. As one of the few mourners at Brown’s Harlem funeral, he spooks a scarred school kid lurking around into taking off and promptly becomes convinced he’s the key to a case the cops have filed under “Forget.” Meantime, another case has struck closer to home: The gallery of Judith Henley Harper, Marina’s former agent, has been bombed during painter Sol Beck’s opening, sending Judy to the hospital and Terry back to work to find out who planted the bomb in a way designed to cause minimal damage and then phoned Judy to warn her. Lin-Lin Chin, Beck’s wife, insists the perp must be Beck’s hostile father, but Terry, who idolizes his precocious daughter Bella, can’t believe anybody could treat his own child that way. Or could he?
Music critic Fusilli’s debut is high-minded and drenched in atmosphere, with long, looping descriptions of night, the city, and the power of love that readers will find either darkly exalting (think Seven with family values) or intolerably literary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14793-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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