Overwrought in content, gracefully subdued in tone: an entertainment that falls short of its apparently lofty goals.
Duncker (The Doctor, 2000) returns with an elegantly written, ultimately silly modern gothic featuring incest, sexual ambiguity, sadomasochism, and evil personified.
Toby Hawk, 18, never knew his father and has lived isolated in the English suburbs with his mother, Isobel, a successful painter, in an intense relationship that sometimes crosses the line into incest. When Isobel takes a mysterious lover, Toby’s jealousy turns to obsession with the man, and after he meets Roehm (one name only), he experiences sexual desire for him as well. Roehm’s hands and breath are icy, the animals in his laboratory exhibit terror at his approach, he knows people’s secrets and is able to manipulate computers as if by magic, even pulling Toby onto a virtual glacier. Who is he? Toby’s father? An ex-Nazi? A Swiss botanist who died in 1786? Toby’s great-aunt Luce has never met Roehm but fears he will kill Isobel. Luce’s lesbian lover, a barrister, discovers that there’s no record of Roehm’s existence. Toby witnesses the primal scene between his mother and Roehm and enacts but fails to consummate the Oedipal acts of intercourse with her and murder of him. Duncker underlines the seriousness of her intent with references to Faust, Roland Barthes (on “Death of the Father”) and passages from Frankenstein, whether as homage to Mary Shelley or to emphasize that this novel, too, deals with perverse fatherhood. Among unexplained mysteries for the reader are why Duncker chooses to include excessively lengthy excerpts from Toby’s on-line research, as well as descriptions of Windows icons and familiar objects such as slot machines: Are these meant to create an effect of estrangement or did they merely need to be edited?
Overwrought in content, gracefully subdued in tone: an entertainment that falls short of its apparently lofty goals.Pub Date: July 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008593-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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