Bullying narcissists make poor company, and the refusal to allow this one to learn anything is a risky authorial move.
Bestselling Spanish author Navarro (Shoot, I'm Already Dead, 2013, etc.) details the life choices of an unpleasant character in this aptly titled novel.
Thomas Spencer reflects on his past because he knows he's dying. "Tonight I am overwhelmed by memories of my life, and they all leave the taste of bile in my mouth." "As I look death in the face, I'll go over what I have lived through. I know what I did, and what I should have done." As a child of privilege growing up in New York City, he torments his nanny and frames his teacher. He tries to kill his little brother by pushing him out the window, then to separate his parents by convincing his father his mother is having an affair (she isn't). Later, he becomes an adman and moves on to blackmail, affairs, domestic violence, political machinations. He describes himself as "scum," "a scorpion." Other characters call him "a miserable bastard...a son of a bitch," "a man with no principles." When his mother dies of cancer: "I searched within myself for some emotion, but I couldn't feel a thing." He imagines the way each pivotal scene would have gone if he'd acted differently, but: "I wasn't struck with remorse for a single moment." This goes on for more than 800 pages, and the writing often feels banal. Of sex with a "high-end" prostitute he later drives to suicide: "It was a voyage of discovery into sensations I did not know existed." Of the differences between New York and London: "New Yorkers are more communicative and less formal than the British." There are dark plot twists, but the central question remains the same. "I can't stop asking myself if this life would have been better, the one I didn't want to live because I preferred to be a son of a bitch....But I never wanted to be anything other than what I am."
Bullying narcissists make poor company, and the refusal to allow this one to learn anything is a risky authorial move.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-97325-7
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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