One of the best explorations of a child’s mind and heart in recent fiction, and its talented author’s best book yet.
The technique of portraying adult experience through a child’s eyes and words—accomplished in classic works as otherwise dissimilar as What Maisie Knew and The Catcher in the Rye—is knowingly adopted by the Whitbread Award–winning British author (Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, 2005, etc.).
His family’s adventure abroad is recounted by nine-year-old Lawrence, a precociously ruminative charmer who intuits connections between historical and astronomical information and the emotional unraveling of his “mum” Hannah, who has spirited Lawrence and his bratty younger sister Jemima away from home in Scotland to Rome (where Hannah had formerly lived, happily), far from the ex-husband who, Hannah insists, is stalking them. As the itinerant trio ricochet among stays with various old friends of Hannah’s, Lawrence hesitantly adapts to new surroundings while finding refuge in caring for his beloved hamster Hermann and summarizing for us what he has learned from potted histories of the misdeeds of notorious men. His kid’s-eye views of favorite atrocities orchestrated by Caligula and Nero, for example, are cockeyed delights that feature hilariously inconsistent misspellings. The reader wonders from the beginning whether Hannah’s shrill denunciations of the children’s father are to be trusted. When they return to Scotland to confront the evil their dad supposedly embodies (comparable, in Lawrence’s imagination, to a galaxy-swallowing Black Hole), things take a violent, poignant turn for the worse. The bleak concluding pages hold two contrasting possibilities in a heart-rending balance: Will Lawrence inherit Hannah’s self-destructive instability, or will his innate intelligence and goodness rescue him from her influence? This is the novel that Patrick McCabe’s over-praised The Butcher Boy ought to have been, redeemed by Kneale’s sure-handed restraint.
One of the best explorations of a child’s mind and heart in recent fiction, and its talented author’s best book yet.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52625-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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