Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.
With her usual deftness and clarity, Drabble (The Seven Sisters, 2002, etc.) crosses cultures and centuries, linking the story of an 18th-century Korean Crown Princess with that of a British scholar attending a conference in Seoul.
“Ancient Times” presents the Yi period memoir of the Crown Princess: she’s married at ten; consummates the marriage at 15; loses her first-born in infancy; has a second son, who will become king, and two daughters; watches her husband succumb to madness, slaughter his concubine, and be killed by his own father; and somehow survives into her 70s before dying, to watch over future centuries with curiosity and a wish to have her story revived. “Modern Times” follows the trail of British scholar Babs Halliwell, 42, who travels to a conference in Seoul, carrying an anonymously sent copy of the Crown Princess’s memoirs. Reading the memoir on the flight, Dr. Halliwell finds herself entranced, supernaturally enchanted. “The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally . . . . The princess has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie, and she is gestating and growing within her.” Dr. Halliwell, like the Crown Princess, has a mad husband and lost her firstborn to a genetic illness. She craves a red silk blouse, scarlet stockings—as the Crown Princess once craved a red silk skirt. A Korean doctor takes her to visit the Crown Princess’s gardens and other key sites. She tells the story of the Crown Princess to the conference star, Jan van Joost, which leads to a three-day romantic liaison. Jan asks her advice about adopting a Chinese baby girl with his much younger and eccentric Spanish-Swedish third wife, then dies of a heart attack. The third part, “Postmodern Times,” is a mysterious and mostly effective melding of all the story’s strands.
Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101106-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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