A somber, eloquent meditation on isolation and violence. Wideman (The Cattle Killing, 1990, etc.) sets this tightly focused novel largely in Homewood, the black neighborhood in Pittsburgh that he’s depicted—and memorialized—many times before. The second city referred to in the title is Philadelphia, seen in flashback, in scenes illuminated by the light of the neighborhood inadvertently burned down by the police during their confrontation with the black separatist group MOVE. The three narrators here have all been profoundly scarred by violence: Kassima, still a young woman, has lost her husband to AIDS, and her two adolescent sons to gang-related violence (an ongoing war between the “Red” and “Blue”); Robert Jones, the 50-year-old man whom Kassima takes home in an attempt to dissolve her intense isolation, has had most of his hopes undone by racism; and Mr. Mallory, Kassima’s aged tenant, has been driven to the point of desperation by the violence he has witnessed, beginning when he and some fellow black soldiers were ambushed by white soldiers while serving in Italy in WWII. Mallory, who had lived in Philadelphia, recalls repeatedly his friendship with John Africa, the doomed founder of MOVE. While Kassima and Robert begin a wary courtship, described in first-person narratives of great, idiosyncratic vigor (few novelists capture the tang and rhythm and aggressive force of the spoken word as well as Wideman), Mr. Mallory spends his time wandering Homewood’s streets, hoping to catch the reality of its sufferings with his camera, or writing letters to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whom he reveres. The letters allow Wideman to speculate on the ways in which art can explore (and perhaps partly remedy) alienation and despair. The climax occurs at Mr. Mallory’s funeral, interrupted by the “Blues,” which spurs an aroused Kassima to confront the violence that has destroyed her family and to make public her tenant’s disturbing photos. An angry, moving work from one of the most original, and accomplished, of modern American novelists.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-85730-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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