Where so much experimental fiction seems pessimistic or even cynical about its possibilities, this novel sustains a spirit...
An open-ended, postmodern fable that somehow delivers the satisfaction of the novelistic conventions it subverts.
For a narrative that defies the usual notions of plausibility, cause and effect, beginning and end—and leaves readers wondering what the title might have to do with the plot until the conclusion (or lack thereof)—the latest from La Farge (The Artist of the Missing, 1999, etc.) is a page-turning pleasure. Here is what the novel is “about”: The narrator is a San Francisco computer programmer in his 30s, who refers to twin sisters (named Marie Celeste and Celeste Marie) as his mothers, who never knew his late father but must reconcile conflicting stories about him, and who travels to upstate New York following the death of his grandfather to sort through the estate. While there, he becomes reunited with a Turkish brother and sister whose neighboring ski lodge sparked a family feud, and he resumes his infatuation with the sister. He describes her as like “a fictional character or really like several fictional characters, none of whom could know anything about the others.” Before embracing the future of computers, the narrator was a graduate student in history, specializing in an apocalyptic sect from the mid 19th century, leaving Stanford without finishing his doctoral dissertation because he’d lost faith in history’s meaning or purpose. As one of his mothers tells him, “It was the kind of story you wouldn’t understand until it was finished, which was, she said, true of all stories.” Yet by the time readers reach the point where the narrator is composing this narrative—a past that is very much present—the book has achieved a momentum that extends beyond its conclusion (and continues at luminousairplanes.com, which refers to the text as a “hyperromance”).
Where so much experimental fiction seems pessimistic or even cynical about its possibilities, this novel sustains a spirit of innocence and wonder.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-19431-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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