Only at the end does Urrea fully evoke Teresita’s incandescent spiritual power—in a second novel (after In Search of Snow,...
The making of a young medicine woman in 19th-century Mexico. Urrea, a Mexican-American best known for his prizewinning nonfiction (The Devil’s Highway, 2004, etc.), has based his leisurely account on the life of an ancestor.
Cayetana Chavez is 14 when she gives birth to Teresita, the future healer. Cayetana herself is known as the hummingbird, God’s messenger, and even more auspicious is the red triangle on her child’s forehead. Teresita’s birth takes place on one of the four ranches belonging to Tomás Urrea (the author hasn’t changed the family name), who is one of the Yori, or white masters; his Indian cowboys and fieldhands are the People, or, in the author’s compelling image, nails destined for the hammer. Teresita is one of Tomás’s many love children, and he will eventually acknowledge her, for he has always been fond of the People and is a decent man, despite his philandering. His story is interwoven with that of Teresita, who is abandoned by her mother and abused by an evil aunt until the old medicine woman Huila offers her protection. In 1880, Tomás decides to move everybody north to another ranch that will provide greater safety from the long-time dictator Porfirio Díaz (the political context is sketchy). Teresita, now 15, comes into her own as midwife and healer—until she is raped and apparently killed by a miner. After she comes back to life during her own wake, the pilgrims start arriving by the thousands, though Teresita denies she is a saint and the nonbeliever Tomás deplores the invasion of his ranch. Eventually, the dictator Díaz, getting reports of an insurrection, orders the capture of Teresita and her father. The 19-year-old healer’s death sentence is commuted to exile, and she makes a spectacular exit from the country.
Only at the end does Urrea fully evoke Teresita’s incandescent spiritual power—in a second novel (after In Search of Snow, 1994) that, otherwise, is a mildly engaging look at life on a prerevolutionary Mexican ranch, with amusingly irreverent touches.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-74546-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
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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