Arrivederci, Roma. The wise reader will stick with Fodor’s next time.
All roads lead to Rome for three dizzy duos in this meditation on the nature of love.
An aggregation of confused visitors careens around Rome in a second novel by Babe: Pig in the City co-screenwriter Lamprell (The Full Ridiculous, 2014). Alice, a 19-year-old New Yorker, has stopped over in the Eternal City on her way to meet her lackluster fiance but instead falls in lust with August, a British student on a Motorino scooter. Alec and Meg, a warring married couple from Los Angeles, are at each others’ throats from the moment they arrive at the Rome airport. At Meg’s behest, the well-heeled spouses have flown to Rome for the day on “a mission” to find a specific tile with magical qualities for their home. (Metaphor alert!) Constance, a septuagenarian Londoner, has brought her recently departed husband, Henry, to the city with her, lugging his ashes in a Harrods bag. Accompanied by Lizzie, her forbearing sister-in-law, Constance intends to throw Henry’s remains off the Ponte Sant’Angelo bridge as Henry requested. The tourists run around Rome in concentric circles, making muddled messes of their lives. But the travelers are not to be pitied; rather, the author uses the lightly sketched characters as vehicles for bons mots. Although the narrator describes himself as the spirit of Rome itself, a “genius loci,” in truth the storytelling ping pongs crazily from one character’s perspective to the next. The most successfully drawn people are Alec and Meg; Lamprell has perfect pitch when it comes to marital discord. (“It occurred to Alec that he could kill her, dispose of her body, and be back in California before anyone had even noticed she was missing.”) But by the end, this guidebook reads like it has gone through a Cuisinart, leaving a choppy, chaotic mess.
Arrivederci, Roma. The wise reader will stick with Fodor’s next time.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10555-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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