A finely crafted novel of either serendipity or fate—we never know.
An old man and a young woman sit next to each other on a flight. When the man dies and the woman walks off with a small wooden box he'd been carrying to show his son, their parallel personal histories become entwined, showing the serendipity of life.
This is a small novel with significant depth. Fàbregas has crafted a story of connectedness using language (Spanish, Dutch—and now English in translation) to take the sting out of the chaos of living. A Dutch woman speaks with a Spanish man on a flight to Amsterdam, and when he dies upon landing we become witness to two parallel lives—the man’s recounting of his marriage and family and the search the woman has been on for years now, looking for the “angel” who saved her life as a girl when her own sense of family was lost. The woman meets the man's son as the novel nears a close, learning he has been looking for her to find out about the last moments of his father’s life. Names become important in both searches as links, as clues. The unnamed dead man’s son, Arjen, has the first name of the young man who reached into a burning automobile and carried the woman, then an 8-year-old girl, to safety, though she was made an orphan in the accident. A list of names of "ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE” becomes the Holy Grail when, four years later, the girl, now 12, returns to the town where the accident occurred and cajoles the authorities for a list of names—those who may have been witnesses—and then begins her long quest to find her savior. Fàbregas uses alternating chapters for first-person narration of each protagonist’s story. Chapters labeled “Him” tell the tale of an emigrant from Spain to Holland, working in the Philips television factory to fund his family back home. He finds love and marries Willemien, and their life together is one of bitterly sweet challenges. “Her” chapters reveal the young woman presumably in search of her “angel” but truly in search of herself.
A finely crafted novel of either serendipity or fate—we never know.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-84-944262-5-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Hispabooks
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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