The ever-colorful, mercurial Dufresne follows his acclaimed debut novel, Louisianan Power and Light (1994), with a finely balanced tale about how love's baffling turns both complicate and enrich the midlife of a struggling writer. Lafayette (Laf) Proulx gives up teaching high school in Worcester, Massachusetts, to write, a breach of security for which his milquetoast wife Martha never forgives him—so he leaves her, too, taking his dog with him. Moving in with Judi, a therapist he'd already been having an affair with, he discovers with a shock that he was more welcome as a married man, but he sets up his typewriter and bangs away anyway, ignoring Judi's ambivalence and making the best of the steady stream of rejection slips he receives from literary magazines. He takes an interest in Judi's stories of her past incarnations, and in her pill-popping, trailer-trash family, even when a sister's slaughterhouse boyfriend murders her ex-con husband. The storytelling possibilities of his new life, however, are suddenly arrested, first when he develops writer's block, then when Judi is diagnosed with uterine cancer. As a hysterectomy followed by chemotherapy fails to halt the cancer's spread, Laf helplessly watches his lover waste away before he and she had really had a chance to give their relationship a solid footing. A New Age therapist gives Judi a clearer understanding of her connection to Laf through the centuries, helping her to reconcile herself to her imminent death. Through pain and revelation, Laf stands by her, giving selflessly, and when she's gone, he discovers that he's gained something vital in return. Strong, quirky characters coping honestly with life's misfortune make this a quiet success. Dufresne has written a funny, profoundly accomplished saga of love and loss. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04013-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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