At first glance, this seems to be the worst possible knockoff of 20th-Century Lit 101, but Hunt manages to infuse enough...
A mentally disturbed man’s attempts to help his institutionalized wife, as related by Hunt (The Impossibly, 2001) in a Faulknerian voice that succeeds better than one would have reason to expect.
Although the setting is Indiana, there is more than a whiff of Southern Gothic about this tale, basically a family saga about an unhappy farming clan named Summers. As seen mostly from the perspective (and in the voice) of the simple-minded Noah, the Summers people like your basic cold-blooded, upstanding country folk, neither terribly perverse nor terribly interesting in their own right. Noah’s father was a schoolmaster before he married and settled down to farm life; Noah himself never learned to read and write very well and seems never to have held a job of any kind (although he delivered mail briefly during WWII when postmen were in short supply). Most of his neighbors might look upon Noah as the village idiot, but he is really more in the nature of a seer—quite literally. Noah’s odd, apparently meaningless visions often turn out to be uncanny (he once saw a grandfather clock, for example, hovering over a field in which it lay buried), and the local sheriff made use of his insights more than once. But Noah’s great curse was his inability to help his wife Opal, committed to a mental institution and subjected to the systematic horrors of 1950s-era psychiatry (electrotherapy, etc.). Hunt’s depiction of the inner workings of Noah’s mind (often phrased in extremely long stream-of-consciousness sentences) takes some getting used to, but he becomes a credible and sympathetic character in short order, and his plight—and Opal’s—become equally vivid (and heartbreaking).
At first glance, this seems to be the worst possible knockoff of 20th-Century Lit 101, but Hunt manages to infuse enough life into these old modernist bones that by the end they dance like a Halloween skeleton.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56689-144-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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