A quietly diverting chronicle of friendship taxed to its limits, narrated by the duller friend. As such, it is similar to watching a well-made cup of coffee cool down. Alan and hapless Burt are the men in question, New Yorkers whose history reaches back to their college days. In a somewhat tired modality, Alan was the outgoing romantic who had the ideal love affair, complete with yelping sex, with Suzanne, a stunning blond. Sensitive, shy, hapless Burt (who narrates) longingly watched the lovers tumble in the grass from afar. As they are introduced to the reader, hapless Burt now observes Alan’s pleasant marriage to Lori, wistfully imagining her stifled potential as an artist while forcing himself to admire Alan’s success as a real estate owner. Suzanne reappears in their lives, prompting the full history of her painful breakup with Alan, which concluded with his putative suicide attempt. Alan sees Suzanne again, goes nuts, and pursues her, leaving his wife in the cold. Poor old hapless Burt, of course, is there to comfort Lori and considers himself a possible candidate for the newly single artist’s affection. They make tepid love, exchange tepid kisses, and hapless Burt tepidly wonders if he’s doing the right thing. Meanwhile, Suzanne and Alan’s affair takes a nosedive, Alan’s business begins to collapse, and just as Burt begins to feel Lori tipping toward marriage, Alan returns, hat in hand. Hapless Burt is tossed aside, but later concludes that his friendship with Alan remains strong. You get the picture: he’s hapless. Burt’s characterization of his own, eventual marriage——No more loneliness, but no more thrills——nicely captures the companionship readers will find with this debut novel.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57962-021-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
