Mr. Barth's grandiose novel is constructed as an elaborate Conceit: the World is a University. Thus, Mankind is Studentdom; God becomes the Founder; failing and passing elevate to existential phenomena; East-Campus militates against West-Campus, and both await the coming of the Messiah-like Grand Tutor, who will free them from the terror of the ultimate machines — EASCAC and WESCAC. To this troubled cosmos comes Goat Boy George, who was raised by a renegade Jewish intellectual among the beasts of the field in gamboling innocence. On learning that he is really of Studentdom and not Goatdom, George gets it into his head that he is the Grand Tutor and sets out to free the University. First he must qualify as a simple student. He enters the mainstream of University life for a couple of terms and discovers all the absurdities of the higher order, magnified of course by his experiences as a goat. In an attempt to prove that he is the authentic Grand Tutor, George is given a number of Delphic super-feats to perform. He does, but he emerges from his Odyssey with a Zen-like philosophy of the cyclic futility of progress, the unteachability of wisdom...There is erudite word-wit here, a fertility of ideas that is almost febrile, a colossal serio-comic point of view, big, bawdy and boisterous. Barth plays a Swiftian game ambitiously. But it runs on and on and on. His major conceit, finally, is the assumption that the reader will tolerate almost anything for an intolerable length of time merely because it is awfully philosophical and terribly clever.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 1966
ISBN: 0385240864
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1966
IN THE NEWS
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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