A splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame, identity, and love that reaches real depths of thought and feeling...
A haunting tale of obsessive love and buried secrets that won’t stay buried, recounted by Labiner (Our Sometime Sister, 1998) in a hyperliterary tone that recalls the best of Borges or Cyril Connolly.
This is one of those stories in which much of the reader’s pleasure comes from watching the author have such a good time telling the tale. Our narrator is a highly introspective young American, Fern Jacobi, who has finished college and landed in Ireland at the end of an extended tour of Europe. Short on plans and cash alike, she accepts a job as housekeeper for Owen and Brigid Lieb, a literary couple who have just returned after 20 years’ absence to their home outside Galway. For the precociously intellectual Fern, the job is a stroke of luck, since Owen is a well-known writer who is also famous as the widowed husband of Franny Lieb. Franny (obviously modeled on Sylvia Plath) published only one book (a novel called The Bright Corner) during her lifetime, but she has had a cult following ever since her suicide in 1963. Owen’s second wife is now writing her first book, a biography of Marcel Proust (whom she claims was her grandfather), and she soon comes to rely on the younger but more self-assured Fern’s advice as she begins her literary career. Soon Fern becomes fascinated by the figure of the dead Franny, and, when she discovers a cache of Franny’s unpublished letters, she begins to look more closely into the circumstances of her suicide (or was it murder?) and her unhappy marriage to the enigmatic and morbid Owen. She’ll be led to a number of rather stunning discoveries—about herself and the Liebs—that make her feel (literally) like a new woman.
A splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame, identity, and love that reaches real depths of thought and feeling without seeming forced or pompous.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56689-136-1
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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