Auster here turns from the metafictional playfulness of his recent detective yarns (City of Glass, 1985, and Ghosts, p. 822), and offers a spare and chilling account of a civilization in decay It's a post-apocalyptic vision of urban holocaust that bears witness to past, present, and future devastations. Anna Blume, young, beautiful, and once a pampered rich girl, here writes to an unnamed friend, who may never even see this notebook, about her years in an unnamed land, searching for her brother, William, a journalist who disappeared while on assignment. What's happened in this "country of last things" remains unclear: "where the past is concerned, the truth tends to get obscured quickly." Anna instead records the aftermath—the near-total destruction of all evidence of humanity. With little hope of escape, survival means forgetting former comforts and former selves. Death, now an "art form," pervades in this city where "there is nothing people will not do." Runners jog into a fatal frenzy; leapers hurl themselves from buildings; assassination Clubs and Euthanasia Clinics provide further opportunity for self-destruction. And through the carnage, Anna persists on her dark pilgrimage, struggling with Despair, joining the Scavengers, those barely living foragers who pick through the rubble. Amidst the "doom and gloom" as in "Blume," Anna discovers love in the ruins—for the maternal Isabel, herself mated to a nasty miniature shipbuilder, Ferdinand (the former patrons of a more famous explorer?); for Victoria Woburn, a Jane Addams manquÉ, whose settlement house seems to destroy as many people as it helps; and for Samuel Farr, also sent by William's paper, whose massive oral history of the "the Troubles" goes up in flames. As allegorical as Pilgrim's Progress and as heartfelt as Anne Frank's Diary, this relentlessly abstract narrative remains grounded in the everyday world and thereby resonates with both moral and historical truth. A stunning achievement.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0140097058
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
IN THE NEWS
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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