Yoder, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, doesn’t get much more dramatic than these high-minded face-offs, but the overall...
Sigmund Freud spars with Henry James in this light and amusing historical novel.
Although there is no evidence that Freud ever met novelist James, the contemporary thinkers would have had much to discuss. In this fanciful imagining of such a meeting, Yoder (Telling Others What to Think, 2004, etc.) envisions a visit brought about by the novelist’s brother (and Freud’s psychological colleague) William James, who fears that Henry’s increasingly ornate later literary style is the result of obsessive neuroses. The year is 1908, when the younger James was in fact revising his earlier works. Yoder creates a young scholar, Horace Briscoe, to observe the events both at the time and from a later date when, as a noted academic, he must decide what to do with Freud’s incomplete case notes taken during a brief, informal psychoanalysis performed on the novelist during the visit. Briscoe also serves as the hero of a romantic subplot, as his courtship of the troubled but beautiful Agnes brings more human drama into play. But the action in this brief novel is really between the great men, and they are at odds from the start. James’ famed celibacy, for example, makes an obvious focus for Freud, who was then disseminating his theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipal complex. But to the fastidious, if not prissy, James, such notions are repellent. To James, the Austrian intellectual is primarily a wonderful character; he is chiefly concerned with capturing the doctor’s mannerisms as fodder for letters to his dear friend, Edith Wharton. When James begins poking fun at Freud, his young assistant steps in to warn the doctor, and the long passages detailing the great minds’ views of each other are the highlight of the book.
Yoder, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, doesn’t get much more dramatic than these high-minded face-offs, but the overall effect is knowledgeable fun.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933372-34-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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