Echoes of The Sun Also Rises and Isherwood’s Berlin Stories aside, this is a potent and deeply disturbing portrayal of...
The interactions of an international cast of pleasure-seekers who meet, impulsively connect, then splinter apart during one gaudy winter in Poland form the core of this intense, unsettling debut.
Its actions begin in the fall of 1990 when young American college graduate Gurney walks out on his unsuspecting girlfriend and their newborn daughter, accepting a longstanding invitation to join his cousin Jane, an expatriate teacher living in Krakow. The barely concealed mutual sexual attraction between the two intensifies almost immediately, and as they draw closer together, then irreparably distant, Beckman makes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) linkages between Poland’s recent history of defeat, disorder, indulgent sensuality, and rapacity (it’s “a world in which money is what matters”) and the excesses and deceptions practiced by characters who cluster around the brooding, charismatic Gurney and the manipulative Jane. These include Jane’s divorced flatmate Grazyna, a painter, and the latter’s teenaged daughter Wanda; the cadre of willful young bohemians among whom Wanda defiantly asserts her independence; a bisexual American woman student attracted to both Gurney and Jane; epicurean troublemaker Dick Chesnutt; and (the novel’s most compelling character) Grazyna’s ex-husband Zbigniew Zamoyski, a cultivated academic and political chameleon whose contained violence will reach out toward all within his orbit. Their shared and separate experiences during a volatile three-month period, ranging, roughly, from Halloween through Christmas, energetically mock the phenomena of celebration, in a taut narrative that includes a dramatic visit to the museum at Auschwitz, Gurney’s brief tenure at a flashy gambling casino, and a climactic “Xmas feast” of an orgy (“a Holocaust of pleasure”) during which the last vestiges of Gurney’s self-control and self-respect are savagely stripped away.
Echoes of The Sun Also Rises and Isherwood’s Berlin Stories aside, this is a potent and deeply disturbing portrayal of innocence destroyed and corruption rampant: the work of a most ambitious and unquestionably gifted writer.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6904-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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