Carefully constructed and well told: a work of tremendous, quiet power.
Osborn (Between Earth and Sky, 1996, etc.) offers a haunting tale of the grief, jealousy, recrimination, and revenge in the wake of a young man’s accidental death.
Kay always knew that she was bound to marry either David or Michael. An only child who never knew her father, Kay grew up lonely and insecure in the Massachusetts college town where her mother taught art history and made pottery. She became inseparable from the two brothers who lived next door and for years seemed almost a part of their family. In high school, Kay started dating David, and they had already begun a fairly passionate affair by the time both entered college—right there in town, under the watchful eyes of their families. David, brighter and more outgoing than Michael, was a golden boy: the apple of his father’s eye, forever trying to test his limits, break records, and surpass everyone’s expectations. Michael was content to stay in the shadows. One night, however, David’s hubris became his undoing when, having taken LSD, he jumped off a bridge (convinced that he could dive safely into the river and swim to shore) and died. During the police investigation that followed, Michael claimed that Kay (who was with David at the time) pushed him, and she was brought to trial for manslaughter. Was Michael’s testimony the pent-up envy of the scorned brother? Not entirely—for, on the very day of David’s funeral, Kay seduced Michael (or did Michael seduce Kay?). At any rate, Kay is left in a very bad position indeed, since she had concealed a number of things from the police in her initial interview (mainly that she and David had been lovers), and now her credibility is called into question just when she needs it most. Narrated from different perspectives in alternating chapters, the story has a Rashomon-like intensity.
Carefully constructed and well told: a work of tremendous, quiet power.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-15899-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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