Raises questions but lacks satisfying conclusions, which is apparently the point.
In this first novel from British author Powell, the sale of self-described leftist and ex-communist Feliks Zhukovski's life work, a travel guide to Eastern Europe, precipitates sweeping late-life changes.
The American company that offers Feliks a sumptuous sum for his guide won't be keeping him on in any sort of advisory capacity—his work reads like Eastern Bloc propaganda, and, as he sells the guide, the Soviet Union is becoming history. Feliks, oddly robotic and unemotional, is perpetually perplexed—a bachelor who seems never really to have experienced life, nor, as he realizes in his 60s as a chronic traveler, the concept of home, despite his having maintained an apartment in Paris. His first visit to America to sell his guide to a New York publishing house becomes an opportunity to meet a long-lost brother, Woodrow, from whom he was separated as a youth when their Polish mother shipped her sons off just as the Nazis prepared to invade. Fissures develop in Feliks' emotionless façade. He begins to entertain the possibility that his dislike of Capitalism and the West may not be as soundly founded as he had thought, and, overcome with emotion with regards to Woodrow and the fate of the mother they have been unable to locate for 25 years, he undergoes a process of ideological apostasy. Back in Paris, with time and money on his hands, he obtains his mother's last address. He also pursues leads on the one bona fide romance of his long, dry life. The narrative's inertia and twists, not to mention Feliks' dry sense of humor superimposed against a geographical and historical backdrop, often make for funny and compelling reading. But Feliks' obsessive reassessment of his politics, spurred by realizations of the untruths and injustices on which they were based, slows to a sometimes sentimental picaresque populated by flat characters acting as foils for his interior monologue.
Raises questions but lacks satisfying conclusions, which is apparently the point.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-14-311726-1
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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