A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.
The seven ages of man, and woman, are traced against the tremendous historical and social shifts of a switchback century.
“He could bend, she could not.” That, in a nutshell, is the dynamic of the marriage between Harry Miles and Evelyn Hill, a union that starts in the early years of World War II, stretches over multiple decades, and concludes in fog, fading, and—for readers of this new novel from Page (The Two of Us, 2016, etc.)—quite possibly a lump in the throat. A tale of England in the second half of the 20th century, of social mobility, sex, love, and pain, it’s also an appreciation of poetry, the literary form that Harry discovers as a schoolboy and which remains his touchstone throughout a long life. A scholarship boy, Harry transcends his working-class origins thanks to education and a “good” war, emerging to father three clever children, build a comfortable new home, and secure a solid white-collar job. His other constant is his love for Evelyn, although their natures are not a perfect match. Harry is patient and peaceable, while Evelyn is more driven and increasingly intransigent. Page’s treatment of what is in essence an ordinary story of two English people’s long domestic involvement against a rolling pageant of external events quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing. Harry’s perspective dominates, the inner landscape of a man attuned to nature, to detail, to old-fashioned virtues. Querulous, perfectionist Evelyn hardens and flattens into two dimensions as the arc of the marriage tips down toward its late phase, yet Page’s watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end.
A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-209-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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