Next time out, a little light music, please.
A bizarre killer, a beset heroine, a relentlessly bleak novel after a relentlessly bleak debut.
Anna Neale is pretty, scholarly, completely absorbed in her discipline (entomology), and absolutely clueless outside it. If it's not about insects, a friend points out, her curiosity is nil—an insight accounting for the nonstop bewilderment Anna experiences after the sudden death of her husband. Nick, she discovers, had affairs she didn't know about, a law practice wildly different from the one she'd imagined, and a son of whose very existence she had no inkling. Her world rocks, stability the stuff of some other life. Most difficult for her to come to terms with is the way Nick died: by anaphylactic shock as the result of a bee sting—when all his life Nick had been on guard against precisely that, thoroughly aware of how easily he could be poisoned. This would not have seemed so strange, though, if self-absorbed Anna had understood the reality of what had been happening. Not strange at all, given the twisted nature of one Michael Mullen and the games he relished playing, not to mention how intensely he'd been watching Anna and the degree to which he wanted her. And yet she was by no means the first of his special targets. Successful, oh-so-plausible Michael, dabbler in real estate, dealer in drugs, is by avocation a stalker, a particular kind. He stalks women with rascally husbands, chooses his moment to murder same, then reveals to the grieving widows the excruciating details of how they've been cheated and betrayed. He thinks of that as his courtship gift. Angered and vulnerable, so do his prey. As well written and carefully plotted as Parsons’s first effort (Mary, Mary, 1999), but it's such an unrelieved funeral march.
Next time out, a little light music, please.Pub Date: March 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86982-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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