A work of frequent beauty but puzzling intent.
An elderly woman’s diary of daily life in the Midwest provides inspiration for this assemblage of found text.
Scanlan’s debut begins with an indispensable author’s note in which she describes acquiring a diary at an estate auction. The diary spanned five years in the life of an Illinois woman who was 86 years old when she began the project of keeping track of her days. Falling apart and badly water-damaged, the diary was only partly legible. But the voice Scanlan found within it—idiosyncratic, matter-of-fact—compelled her to keep returning to the diary, rearranging and collaging bits of language. The result, labeled “part diary, part collage, part fiction,” is a slender volume arranged by seasons; most pages feature only a few words. The weather is one obsession: “Terrible windy,” reads one entry, “everything loose is traveling.” We get glimpses of chores, like sewing and canning, and gossip from others’ lives. A narrative starts to emerge when one recurring figure, seemingly a son or son-in-law, gets severely ill and then, in the hospital, “seemed to just sleep away.” There is an undeniable poignancy in the readerly act of filling in the gaps of this octogenarian's life, her voice pulled into the present from where it had been suspended in the late 1960s/early '70s. Scanlan’s project will be familiar to anyone who reads contemporary poetry: Titans like Susan Howe or Solmaz Sharif have made stunning poems from found text. But Scanlan’s book is “part fiction,” and it’s unclear where the invention, if any, actually comes in. What are the woman’s words, and what aren’t? Scanlan doesn’t explain. And where Sharif or Howe use public texts, this is private writing manipulated and published as a work of art by Scanlan. Here, the text offers pleasures that the context complicates.
A work of frequent beauty but puzzling intent.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-10687-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
