A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.
A French actress living in Los Angeles falls hard for a Cameroon-born actor whose obsession with directing a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness leads them both to his home country.
Readers looking for a feminist hero probably won’t find her in Solange, the white film actress at the center of Darrieussecq’s (All the Way, 2013, etc.) exploration of race, celebrity, and (mostly) unreciprocated love. Solange is instantly smitten when, at a party thrown by her friend George (as in Clooney, surname implied), she sees Kouhouesso, whose mere presence reduces her to “to silence and solitude. Soon she's sleeping with this handsome, self-serious man, whose “big idea”—a film version of Heart of Darkness, shot in Africa—will always, it’s clear from the start, be his first priority. Kouhouesso will disappear for days in between their encounters, texting occasionally but generally aloof. And so it goes: he works, she waits, and though their relationship turns more serious, it never really evolves. As a commentary on race, Darrieussecq’s novel doesn’t always break new ground (“Up until now she had scarcely thought about Africa, other than to send off a cheque”). As a chronicle of the humiliations and occasional joys of loving someone whose own feelings are more ambiguous, though, it feels queasily accurate. The story works especially well once the narrative shifts to Cameroon, where the details of the film shoot, from an ill-fated attempt to get a group of Pygmy girls to perform for the camera to various prop and costume setbacks, add some real comic edge to the proceedings.
A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-925240-91-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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