A debut novel that will appeal most to punch-drunk bibliophiles.
A loopy play on literary life from Paris Review editor Rich.
Constance Eakins, “a colossus of the last American century,” was, before his death at 82, ferociously at work on The Mayor’s Tongue, the 26th tome in an august career highlighted by his major trilogy, The Slayed, The Slaying and The Slaughter, just released by Modern Library, with a foreword by the esteemed Director of the Eakins Center at Yale. This kind of bogus pomposity plainly delights the author. The book of the title—and the mayor—and the tongue—are largely mythic, part of the strange quest of white-haired, book-mad Chisholm, Eakins’s fiercest fan. A recent émigré from the Dominican Republic, Alvaro, a former furniture mover, is commissioned to catalogue all of Chisholm’s Eakinsiana, for him an oddly delicate pursuit. Alvaro’s tale, including his attempt to have his own literary opus translated, despite his translator’s total ignorance of Alvaro’s Dominican dialect, alternates chapters with the tale of two congenial and truly odd oldsters, Mr. Schmitz and Rutherford. Schmitz’s beloved wife Agnes is nearing death and, desperate for Rutherford’s solace, Schmitz hunts him everywhere. But, after the pair’s long conversations—highlights include the fact that “Ferrara” is the most difficult Italian city name to pronounce—Rutherford vanishes. The novel’s narratives play off each other, offering literary allusions to H.L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir and Yasunari Kawabata.
A debut novel that will appeal most to punch-drunk bibliophiles.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-990-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
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