Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.
A whimsical debut novel set during one of history’s ugliest periods.
It’s 1938. Levi, a smart fox terrier, lives in Berlin with professor Carl Liliencron, his wife, Rahel, and their children, Georg and Else. Carl is a renowned expert on plankton, and the Liliencrons occupy a luxurious town house provided by the German National Academy of Sciences. However, the Liliencrons are Jewish, and Hitler’s fanatics are increasingly violent. Carl reacts by lightheartedly changing Levi’s name to Sirius, but then Kristallnacht occurs and the Liliencrons face transport to concentration camps. Rahel has a childhood friend in Hollywood, the actor Peter Lorre, who helps with papers and money to escape. In the U.S.A., the Liliencrons explore Tinseltown, meeting and interacting with movie stars of fame and fortune—Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, etc. As professor Liliencron becomes Crown, the chauffeur, the charismatic Levi/Sirius earns a film contract from Jack Warner, who dubs him Hercules. Anthropomorphism be damned, author Crown succeeds in employing the wiry little canine’s point of view for a good portion of the story. A pop star of the first magnitude, Levi/Sirius/Hercules becomes a Chaplinesque character, but then he loses Warner’s confidence and is banished to the circus. Crown then ramps up the fantasy, with the pup being shanghaied to Germany, where this supposedly devious “Jewish pet" becomes Hansi, Hitler’s favorite companion. The Liliencrons, meanwhile, wax and wane among the stars until they make the decision at war’s end to return to Berlin. World War II was a grotesque human tragedy, but Crown has employed the obscenity of the Holocaust to create a fable about family, the timeless connection between human and dog, and the nature of identity.
Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781501144998
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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