This vivid novel races and sputters jerkily, but it’s an exhilarating ride nevertheless.
The apocalypse, provocatively envisioned with wild invention and irreverent wit.
The declarative title and confrontational theology link Currie’s second novel quite logically with its predecessor (God Is Dead, 2007). John Thibodeau Jr., aka “Junior,” grows up oppressed by the message received from a mysterious otherworldly voice during his infancy that in 36 years, on June 15, 2010, a comet will destroy all life on earth. As Junior warily prepares to undertake an undisclosed “task,” the story’s viewpoint shifts among our protagonist (who addresses himself in a frequently clumsy second-person voice); his stoical, sentient dad; frail alcoholic mother; older brother Rodney, who’s both a juvenile delinquent and a baseball phenom; and Junior’s schoolmate Amy, who spends years worrying whether he’ll ever become the man she can love. The peregrinations and problems of these necessarily connected characters are smartly juxtaposed with evidence in the world around them (e.g., the Challenger explosion) that suggests Junior isn’t delusional. In some passages, Currie seems to be straining to fill pages: a terrorist plot against a Miami federal building engineered by a drug-dealing triple amputee; a sequence detailing Amy’s foolhardy behavior aboard an airplane and her subsequent victimization by paranoid security personnel. But everything keeps circling back to Junior’s unique ordeal and mission, and Currie pulls off a beautiful twist that reconfigures the narrative’s momentum (arranged in a precise countdown), presenting an ironic and quite moving alternative version of the looming near future. In this brave old world, Rodney’s Chicago Cubs make it to the World Series—and you’ll never guess who has been elected president of the United States.
This vivid novel races and sputters jerkily, but it’s an exhilarating ride nevertheless.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02092-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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