The novel ultimately ties some knots but leaves too many strands loose.
A quasi-mystery that spends too much time within the mind of the uninteresting first-person narrator.
The Scottish-born Burnside (A Lie About My Father: A Memoir, 2007, etc.) returns to his native land with a plot that suggests the presence of the devil in an isolated seaside village, while leaving the identity of that devil open-ended. Protagonist Michael Gardiner sets the plot in motion when he learns of the suicide of a woman he dated as a teenager. The woman, Moira Birnie, set her car ablaze with her young children inside. Curiously, she left behind her 14-year-old daughter Hazel. Michael suspects that Moira killed her children and herself to escape her devil of a husband, Tom. But why has she spared Hazel? After doing his calendar calculations, Michael suspects that Hazel isn’t Tom’s daughter, but his own. Since Michael’s marriage is all but dead, and most of the marriages in the village seem as troubled as Moira and Tom’s apparently was, Michael’s obsession with Hazel provides new life (at least in his mind) for the two of them. Yet in the novel’s evocation of Lolita, there’s something a little creepy in the way that Hazel becomes his life’s focus. Within the yo-yo of the novel’s chronology (as Michael spends more time living in the past than the present), the reader learns that the Gardiners have long endured an adversary relationship with the rest of the village, that Michael and his parents have kept fatal secrets from each other and that Michael has a history of both sleepwalking and dreaming a parallel reality that he sometimes has trouble distinguishing from his waking one. With Michael’s insistence that he’s losing his mind as the novel progresses, it becomes harder for the reader to distinguish what’s really happening. And whether the fault lies with the novelist or his protagonist, none of the characters that Michael describes seem fully formed.
The novel ultimately ties some knots but leaves too many strands loose.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52209-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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