Lushly imagined but filled with clichés: basically another “prostitute with a heart of gold” story, tarted up with...
Colombian Restrepo (Leopard in the Sun, 1999, etc.) offers a romantic concoction about a community of prostitutes (putas) servicing workers from the oil fields.
A nameless 12-year-old girl arrives in Toro and announces her desire to become a puta to the first person she meets, a boy named Santiago. With misgivings, he takes her to Todos los Santos, a prostitute whose age is catching up with her. Todos sees the possibilities in “the girl” and devotes herself to her upbringing and training. Two years later, as the girl is about to embark on her career, Santiago, her devoted playmate and an idealist, is racked with guilt that he brought her to Todos in the first place. Leaving Toro to seek a fortune that will allow him to save the girl, he ends up at the oil fields, where he befriends Payanés. Meanwhile, the girl transforms herself into Sayonara, the most mysterious and desirable prostitute in the city. Santiago, literally sick with guilt and idealized love, sends Payanés to Toro as his messenger, and, not unexpectedly, the two fall in love. Payanés promises to visit Sayonara one Friday a month, a day she’ll reserve for him alone. Naturally, Payanés and Santiago’s friendship is strained, but Sayonara breaks the putas’ cardinal rule and asks for too much—the permanence of family. Payanés breaks her heart by admitting that he already has a family in his hometown—at which point Santiago jumps into the breach and marries Sayonara. The couple leave Toro, but Santiago is unable to forget that his wife was a prostitute. Eventually, his jealousy drives her back to Toro, where the glory days of the putas have passed. Sayonara disappears again. All await her return.
Lushly imagined but filled with clichés: basically another “prostitute with a heart of gold” story, tarted up with references to Fellini and pretentious pronouncements about love.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008894-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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