Erdrich keeps to her cast of rich Chippewa characters here—Pillagers, Kashpawa, Lazarres: familiar to readers of both Love Medicine and The Beet Queen—but has placed them chronologically before the setting of those other novels. It's at a period (1912-24) that sees the death knell of their most natural Indian identity, thanks to famine and economic rapaciousness and the pressures of missionary Christianity. Two narrators hold sway here: one is Nanapush—an old but still sapid man, in touch with the throngs of dead all around him in the woods near the sacred lake Matchimanito (the most striking poetry of the ever-lyrically inventive Erdrich is this book's frequent and moving invocation of the spirits as milling within sight of the living—a seamlessness of states), and desperately trying to hold on before the lumber interests come and buy his land for nothing from him. Holding on is all but impossible, though—for there is no food: the Chippewa are dying like flies, and pittances matter. If Nanapush is the totem of the book, his antipode is mixed-blooded Pauline, at book's end a nun but until then ablaze with sexual jealousy and torment. Her chief nettle is Fleur Pillager, widely believed to be a water-witch, whose ease in love and revenge and self-confidence makes her a frighteningly awesome presence to most men and women. Erdrich's prose is rich, her imagination remarkably agile (paragraphs take strange jerky turns, rarely going where you thought they might), her sympathy and unsentimentality striking—yet this is a diffuse book, one lacking a core—either of emblem, as in Love Medicine, or screwy, heartbreaking story, as in The Beet Queen. If you've read those others, you'll read this too—its pages about the famine are unforgettable—but in a mood of generality, of taking in characters we're told are extraordinary but are rarely shown as such. Not the best Erdrich, in other words, but a block nonetheless in her quite special ongoing oeuvre.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1988
ISBN: 0060972459
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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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