Early experimentation by a gifted German voice.
Recent translation of a 1976 semi-fantastic novel by the late Becker (Jakob the Liar, 1996, etc.), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who opted to stay in Germany after WWII.
Aron Blank “materializes” out of postwar Germany, having spent the war in a concentration camp. The war has effectively erased him. His internment has made a “blank” of him quite literally: he needs a new identity card even to exist. It’s not long before he’s set up with an apartment and a lover, Paula, who works for Rescue, an organization that reunites families displaced by the war. In short order, Rescue helps Aron locate his son, Mark, in Bavaria. Aron barely remembers the boy, and vice versa, and at the orphanage, where more than 200 children are housed Aron realizes that the director could simply decide which boy is his. Still, they find Mark, the awkwardness of the reunion passes, and the boy comes to live with Aron, and for a time it looks as if the war will have a kind of happy ending. Then Rescue finds Walter, Paula’s old beau. Aron sinks into despair as she leaves. He no longer works in the black market but turns to doing translation for Russian authorities, and soon he has a new love, Irma. As Mark grows up, he starts to show an interest in boxing—indeed, Aron was something of a boxer before the war. Time begins to pass quickly: Aron inherits $50,000 from a friend who dies in Baltimore; has a heart attack; divorces Irma; retires; and is left again with Mark as his only connection to the outside world. More interesting than the actual story is Becker’s narrative strategy: throughout, Aron is being interviewed by the novel’s journalist narrator; their conversations are a kind of continuous interruption reminding us that the story is as much about a writer’s relationship with his material as it is about Aron’s travails.
Early experimentation by a gifted German voice.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55970-615-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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