In a novel seemingly about a man's coming to terms with his own humanity and the depth of feeling within his heart, Begley (The Man Who Was Late, 1993; Wartime Lies, 1991) is unlikely here to evoke any depth of feeling in the reader's heart. He's too busy flaunting his considerable knowledge about the pretensions of the rich and the portentousness of the gifted. Max Foster, a distinguished law professor at Harvard, has led a life devoid of deep emotional attachments. On holiday in Italy, he becomes reacquainted with an old friend named Charlie Swan, a brilliant architect who has taken up a life of homosexuality after a painful divorce. Charlie's current lover is a beautiful boy named Toby, a spiritual orphan who becomes the older man's son/lover/apprentice. The paths of Max and Charlie cross frequently over the course of the novel, as Max begins to open his heart to the love of various women, most notably a duplicitous English intellectual who becomes his wife. The problem is, although Max is supposed to become a more sympathetic character as the book progresses, Begley never really lets us inside the heart of his protagonist. Max says he is hurt when his wife leaves him, but the reader feels no affinity for his pain. Begley does, however, frequently drop the names of exotic locales, prestigious families, and fancy liqueurs. Only when Toby is diagnosed as having AIDS does Max exhibit any kind of real emotion, and even then, it pales in comparison to Charlie's desperation. Nonetheless, As Max Saw It is an enjoyable read, most notably for the magnificent character of Charlie Swan, a man so outsized in his feelings and appetites that he dwarfs everyone else in the novel.
Pub Date: April 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43307-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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