A bleak, defiant, bare-knuckles read that will you exhausted by its relentlessly unsympathetic characters. Still, it...
A long-lost unpublished first novel by the author of The Yearling chronicles the malevolent self-sacrifice of a life-blunted wife and mother for her ungracious writer daughter.
Submitted in 1929 to an Atlantic Monthly Press competition, rejected, then ignored until after her death in 1953, Rawlings's manuscript betrays merciless autobiographical incisions (the characters bear real names), as well as the unmistakable talent of a novelist testing her emergent style. The story begins with the rural Michigan childhood of ungainly, unlovely Ida Traphagen, the narrator's mother. “The physical ugliness of my mother was the bitter drop that tainted the fluid of her life,” runs the take-no-prisoners first sentence. Ida's sharp features and crooked nose define her thwarted fate, which is to marry a pious, hardworking, conventional soul with no imagination for bettering himself: Arthur Kinnan, a patent officer whose work takes him to Washington, D.C. There, Ida resolves that if the glamorous life is denied her, then she will live it through her daughter, Marjorie, who will enjoy every spoil she never had: curls despite the girl's straight hair, big-city culture, elaborate children's parties, dancing lessons, fancy schools, and rich friends. Marjorie, however talented in writing, is resistant to Ida's polish, and grows increasingly recalcitrant and brutal to her mother/slave. When Arthur dies, leaving the family without the possibility of gain, Marjorie must settle for an inferior midwestern college and, eventually, a lackluster intellectual husband, thereby driving the defeated mother into her grave. After the young upstart writer who uses too many adjectives heads for New York City, fans of literary history will appreciate Marjorie's anecdotes gleaned from letters home.
A bleak, defiant, bare-knuckles read that will you exhausted by its relentlessly unsympathetic characters. Still, it provides enormously interesting insights into its author's work.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8130-2443-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Florida
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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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