This strangely amusing novella has the power to inspire serious efforts to find significance in the very book in which it is...
Forgotten tyrants and blatant belly buttons have equally playful roles in this deceptively slight, whimsically thoughtful tale of a few men in Paris not doing or saying much.
The sight of young women with exposed navels in the Luxembourg Gardens sets Alain to musing “on the different sources of feminine seductiveness.” Not far away, Ramon avoids a Chagall show because of the long line. D’Ardelo, whose medical tests reveal he doesn’t have cancer after all, nonetheless lies when he meets Ramon in the park and says he does. A man seduces a woman with banal remarks because brilliance challenges her to compete, “whereas insignificance sets her free.” Stalin enters the narrative by way of a biography of Khrushchev given to Charles, who tells a visiting Ramon that “our master” provided it. The master is the narrator or author, whose intrusions resonate with Charles’ desire to use the Khrushchev story in a marionette theater. The Stalin thread opens with a bad joke about his bagging 24 partridges on a hunt, a story derided by Khrushchev and others over the urinals they share. (Scholars may reference the latrine fouled by Stalin’s son in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.) Charles, Ramon, and Alain discuss how the monstrous Stalin has faded from memory. But the narrative recalls an official named Kalinin, a “poor innocent puppet” in Stalin’s government, who has a weak bladder. He and the tyrant reappear late in the book, shooting and urinating in the Luxembourg Gardens before driving off in a small carriage drawn by two ponies. Art, sex, disease, history, and friendship are lightly treated themes woven through scenes whose significance may be partly the disproving of a concern raised in Kundera’s Ignorance, that “emigration causes artists to lose their creativity.” But does the Czech-born writer who’s lived in France for years truly believe, at age 86, that insignificance is “the essence of existence”?
This strangely amusing novella has the power to inspire serious efforts to find significance in the very book in which it is so perversely denied.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-235689-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
IN THE NEWS
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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