An important addition to 21st-century war literature, if a flawed one.
A female Italian soldier returns from Afghanistan physically and psychologically wounded and unsure how to start over.
After years of proving her mettle in a sexist Italian military, Manuela was given the command of a platoon in Afghanistan and only barely survived when a suicide bomber attacked the opening of a girls school. As the novel opens, she’s returned home to a small coastal resort town on Christmas Eve to recuperate, and her family—particularly her extroverted sister, Vanessa—is unsure how to help. No matter: Manuela’s attention soon turns to Mattia, a mysterious man who’s the sole occupant of a nearby hotel, and over the course of the following weeks, the two pursue an awkward romance. This novel, Mazzucco’s second in English translation (Vita, 2005), runs on two alternating tracks: a third-person chronicle of Manuela’s present-day recovery and her first-person recollection of her rise in the military and deployment. The latter thread is made of much stronger stuff, revealing Mazzucco’s close research on soldiers and the war in Afghanistan, as well as Manuela’s determination to overcome slights as a female leader to earn the respect of the men serving under her. When Mazzucco strains to suggest that everyday life is rife with similar calamities, she’s on shakier ground; Vanessa’s despairing attempt to find a morning-after pill doesn’t have the same gravitas as a war wound, nor does Mattia’s secret, revealed in the book’s climax. The novel fills an important gap in addressing the lives of female soldiers (and non-American ones), but in its effort to make Manuela’s tale symbolize multiple aspects of military and civilian life, Manuela herself gets a bit lost. Her PTSD, curiously, is treated as relatively minor in the face of holding a family together or finding true love.
An important addition to 21st-century war literature, if a flawed one.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-19198-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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