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
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
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
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