An impassioned exploration of how the past erupts into the present and continues to shape our personalities and our fates.
Leisurely paced, intensely focused tale of collusion and intrigue, spotlighting Colombia’s German community before, during and after World War II.
In 1988, journalist Gabriel Santoro published A Life in Exile, the story of a Jewish refugee who fled to Colombia in the years preceding the war. Gabriel wrote the book, he tells us, to give some perspective on the struggles of such emigrants. His motives didn’t impress his father, also named Gabriel, a leading intellectual in Bogotá with a particular contempt for the shallowness and ephemerality of journalism. Father wrote a scathing review of the book that went far beyond the bounds of necessity or good taste and raised questions about his psychological need to make such an extreme condemnation. Perhaps he has something to hide? When he phones his son three years later, in the novel’s opening pages, is he trying to make amends? Several other events, past and present, conspire to pique the journalist’s curiosity. Why did Konrad Deresser, another member of the German-Colombian community, commit suicide shortly after the war when his son Enrique denounced him as a collaborator? Is the 1991 death of Santoro père in a car crash really an accident? Along the way we meet a range of characters, some well integrated into Colombian culture despite their German roots, others more blatant and unabashed about their support for Hitler’s policies even after the war. With both journalistic and personal reasons to pursue the truth, the younger Santoro tracks down Enrique, though he first has to endure the opprobrium of Enrique’s son Sergio, as well as Angelina, the older Gabriel’s mistress and perhaps betrayer.
An impassioned exploration of how the past erupts into the present and continues to shape our personalities and our fates.Pub Date: July 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-878-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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