Sometimes maddeningly, sometimes brilliantly elusive, Coetzee's new novel gives the Robinson Crusoe story a deconstructionist turn, adding new characters and including the vexed reactions and wisdoms of the original's author himself, Defoe (the foe—upon whom a story breaks not always willingly). Susan Barton is a young widow shipwrecked and thrown to safety on the very island where Crusoe and his man Friday eke out their existence. Crusoe by now is a sort of solitary burgher, unwilling to leave; and Friday. . .no one really knows about Friday, since his tongue has been cut out and he cannot tell anyone anything. Since South African Coetzee has used allegorical political material before, it's allowable to see Friday's cut-out tongue as social emblem for black South Africans; but then, when Susan, Crusoe, and Friday actually are rescued from the island (Crusoe dies mid-journey but Barton and Friday return to England), this impression lessens. What increases is the unstable relation between muse and creator—Susan who was there and Defoe who wasn't, yet who must imaginatively re-create what Susan may also not have known as well as what she did. Sadly, Coetzee muddies this elegantly simple template for art vs. experience by a late professorial brief (delivered by Foe) for writing-qua-itself—a bit of Gallic fashionableness that has the effect of all but shattering the fragile dramatic spell drawn up till then. Often piquant—but also some very, very thin reeds on which to build.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986
ISBN: 014009623X
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
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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