A bit too much, yet not enough.
The author of The Shape of Things to Come (2001) returns with her second novel.
Samantha Hennart is a poet who no longer writes poetry. It’s been at least 20 years since she has composed a line, and she’s not much of a wife or mother, either, and, when she falls to the kitchen floor as an aneurysm explodes in her brain, her family is scattered. Her husband, Bernard, left when he found her having sex with the “hippy carpenter” hired to renovate their bathroom. Her 25-year-old son, Ryan, is across the country in California and relieved to have finally separated himself from his dysfunctional family. And her daughter, Marguerite, 18, is—unbeknownst to anyone—in a mental hospital. This is the story of their history before Sam’s aneurysm and the collective fate that awaits them after it. Casey’s debut was widely praised as ambitious and accomplished. Her second feels self-consciously literary. Every page is filled with lyrical turns that don’t quite convince. The author pushes her characters to dazzle and charm. In one early scene, Sam doesn’t just call her family to dinner, she proclaims, “No more drifting in and out. No more eating in front of the television. No more blah, blah, blah, fuzzy around the edges.” Marguerite—who is named for a medieval mystic—is mesmerized by her brother’s nose, which is not just his nose but his “miraculous nose.” Bernard describes his wife’s forehead as “revelatory”—repeatedly. Indeed, this is a family given to erudite in-jokes and well-worn epithets, but what, exactly, does Sam’s forehead reveal? The fact that we are left without a clue means either that the reader is not worthy of joining the Hennart clique or that Bernard’s rhapsodizing is empty of actual meaning, just as the characters in this novel are not actual people but a series of pretentious poses and ostentatious tics.
A bit too much, yet not enough.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074089-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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