present. (Author tour)
The author of The Patron Saint of Unmarried Women (1994) chronicles the emotional coming of age of a 41-year-old
literary agent who overcomes his fear of commitment when the love child he fathered in his 20s searches him out. Will Gerard’s childhood—in the 1960s Bangkok community of CIA spooks who made daily secret forays into Vietnam—lacked permanent relationships. A best friend one day might disappear the next with his family on some clandestine mission across the globe, never to be seen again. After this, and the trauma of his father’s early death, Will lived adult life as though long-term attachments, either to jobs or to people, were unnecessary complications. Then, after years as a dilettante in the publishing industry, he started a literary agency in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Working from home, with his wisecracking, college-age nephew as his assistant, Will sees his life turn around when he signs a crackpot southern author whose novel on a hero of the “war of northern aggression” sells for big money. After receiving a favorable profile in the pages of The Washington Post, Will then meets Annie, a stunning and successful litigator, and his life seems perfect—except that what Annie wants, a baby, is anathema to a commitment-probe guy like Will. Their relationship threatens to founder when a letter arrives from a woman who suspects that Will is her birth father. His quest over a couple of weeks to determine the truth of her suspicion leads him on a trail where he must contend with the consequences of his lifelong efforts to avoid entanglements and opens his eyes about how he is sabotaging his chance at happiness with Annie. An engaging and well-rounded look at a modern man as he comes to terms with his past so he can live a more fulfilled
present. (Author tour)Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83953-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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