Much to see, hear, and reminisce about in tales of a compelling historic accuracy—though the pleasures, in end, aren’t deep.
Barlow debuts with three novellas: capable, researched, of varying interest.
The title story is doubtless the most engaging, and most awful. After WWII, with food in England still scarce, a waiter in a hotel restaurant is asked by one of the guests to concoct, however he can, an olive-oil-based fruit drink—no less than eight pints of it—and bring it to the guest’s room by that evening. The waiter does so—though he’ll lose his job for having commandeered the scarce ingredients—and, on delivery to the room, asks the gentleman what he needs the concoction for. The guest turns out to be none other than Michael “Cast Iron” Mulligan, professional eater, who began his career by eating great quantities of things but now eats strange kinds of things—and is this night going off to eat a chair. The waiter, fired as soon as he returns to the kitchen, becomes apprentice to Mulligan, learns how to use the big grinding machine that reduces almost anything to theoretical edibility—and carries on the tradition after Mulligan’s sadly forced retirement. Readers will find for themselves what constitutes the epigone’s most extraordinary and repulsive “meal.” In the second story, a mutated kitten born in a Victorian workhouse (the little creature has wings) becomes a kind of catalyst for all sorts of stories, terrifying some people into madness, enchanting others, proving profitable to still more—until tale’s strands are all knit together in a rather Dickensian manner. Barlow’s last novella is another piece of impeccably researched Victoriana, but it also drones on—and on—as a kind of loose-knit and puffed-up tall tale as English villagers go more than all out in creating a great local festival—all to keep the workers’ favorite makers of the new-fangled but much-loved pork pie from leaving town.
Much to see, hear, and reminisce about in tales of a compelling historic accuracy—though the pleasures, in end, aren’t deep.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059175-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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