A gentle, bittersweet, tragicomic rite-of-passage novel translated into lively English by Moore.
A boy comes of age in a chaotic building in chaotic early-1970s Milan.
Chino, at 13, helps out his mother, Elvira, the "doorwoman" (an insulting title she disdains) in a slightly down-at-the-heels apartment house in Milan. Avid for status, Elvira oversees the tumult of life in the building, cleaning, doing favors, providing security, refereeing squabbles, compiling grievances…and desperately saving money, despite her husband’s naysaying, so that when the owner sells to the tenants she can buy her ground-floor caretaker's apartment and ascend to the status of signora, which would bring equality with the building’s sometimes-condescending denizens. An older British woman, the erudite and free-thinking Amelia Lynd, moves in, and soon young Chino becomes her pupil, ward, and near disciple. The maestra (a title awarded by Chino's mother, who’s fond of honorifics) steeps him in literature and lexicography, steers him into a classical school, even tries to insist that his mother start calling him by his given name, Luca. For Elvira, a series of galling betrayals and disappointments follows, and meanwhile, the boy-narrator grows into a bookish semioutsider, one who describes his parents’ fractious relationship, the soap opera of his mother’s ambitions, the slights and conspiracies and idiosyncrasies of the tenants (later owners, with an insistence on the respect they believe ownership should confer), and the rest of his world with amused, affectionate semidetachment.
A gentle, bittersweet, tragicomic rite-of-passage novel translated into lively English by Moore.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2477-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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