Ben-Naftali doesn’t make full use of her material, and the result feels more tired than fresh.
One woman survives the Holocaust; decades later, another imagines what her life might have been like.
Elsa Weiss survived the Holocaust by obtaining a seat on the “Kastner train”—a train that smuggled more than 1,600 Jews to safety after Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann. Kastner’s train was real; in this novel by Israeli writer Ben-Naftali—her first to be translated into English—the reality of Elsa Weiss is up for debate. Once she arrives in Israel, Elsa works for decades as an English teacher before stepping off the roof of her apartment building. The novel is narrated by one of her students, who goes unnamed and who makes a project out of understanding Elsa’s life. That’s not easy to do. No one, it seems, knows anything about Elsa. What follows, then, is a work of the narrator’s imagining—a kind of novel within a novel. Why Ben-Naftali chose this framing device isn’t entirely clear, since she doesn't make full use of it. The vast majority of the book is taken up with descriptions of Elsa’s experiences; only occasionally are we reminded that the real Elsa was a cipher, that these descriptions are the narrator’s imaginings. But Ben-Naftali doesn’t fully explore what it might mean to imagine another person’s life or what these fictions illuminate about the narrator herself. Then, too, the narration hovers at a distance, favoring third-person description over dialogue or scenes in the present. The constant exposition makes Elsa into an abstraction and the other characters into less, even, than that.
Ben-Naftali doesn’t make full use of her material, and the result feels more tired than fresh.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948830-07-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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