A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.
A woman is shaken by her late father’s scathingly critical journal entries in Wilke’s debut novel.
Leo Curzio, a professional writer, avidly chronicled his thoughts for his entire adult life, resulting in boxes of journals containing his meditations on just about everything. After he dies of a stroke, his adult children start to read them, and some are shocked by his brutal judgments. His harshest criticisms were aimed at his daughter Tessa, and he expressed profound disappointment in the distance between her considerable promise as a musician and meager accomplishments as a writer. Tessa is distraught after reading the entries, and she starts to rethink her life in its totality: her failed relationships, her abandoned music career, her abandonment of Catholicism and temporary embrace of Scientology, and her writing career, which she loves but frustrates her. She turns to her aunt, Joanne, a therapist and spiritual counselor, for some solace, and she delves into an assignment for the magazine that employs her—a series on father-daughter relationships. But all this angst-ridden self-reflection takes an emotional toll on her, and her relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Dave, starts to molder under the strain. Wilke writes with razor-sharp wit and radiant flair, and the prose’s high quality is the novel’s principal strength. She also sensitively portrays how real love and affection can survive and even flourish in an otherwise dysfunctional family. However, Tessa’s world-weariness, while often a source of comedic relief, eventually becomes tedious and, at times, painfully self-indulgent. For example, when Dave offers her a heartfelt apology for missing Leo’s funeral, she acidly responds: “Maybe when you’re reviewing your new corporate candidates for your next relationship, you can make sure none of them actually expect you to show up for the important moments. Because while you were busy judging me and my pathetic worldview, you forgot to realize what a shallow, meaningless, unforgivable prick you are.”
A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4975-9630-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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