Less a fully fleshed novel than an extended meditation on the interrelationship between life and fiction.
A writer suspects the story he's writing can alter the story of his life.
Since the 1998 publication of this debut novel, now receiving its first American publication, Swiss author Stamm (All Days Are Night, 2014, etc.) has received international acclaim for his parables and metafictional narratives. This short novel should appeal to readers enchanted by his elliptical style, but it also reads like very early work. A Swiss writer of nonfiction meets a much younger graduate student in the Chicago public library. Even before exchanging names, they sense an intuitive connection, an intimacy of strangers. Her name provides the book’s title, and her obsessions—with death, with having a story written about her—provide its plot. He had earlier dabbled in fiction, even made it 50 pages into a novel, but abandoned it, he tells her, because “I was never in control of my material. It was always artificial. I got so drunk on the sound of my own words.” Quickly and inevitably they become lovers, he more concerned with the age difference than she apparently is, and she keeps pressing him on the matter of fiction: " 'Write a story about me,' she said, 'so I know what you think of me.' " Though the novel is narrated in the first person by the writer, the reader isn’t quite sure what he thinks of Agnes, and neither is he. The results may well surprise all, particularly as he moves from writing what has happened between the two of them—and discovering that their impressions and recent memories differ significantly—and lets the story proceed “into the future. Now Agnes was my creation. I felt the new freedom lend wings to my imagination. I planned her future for her.” Will those plans for the future become reality? Will they include him? Can he edit fate? And what’s with all these forests where people venture and lose themselves, never to return?
Less a fully fleshed novel than an extended meditation on the interrelationship between life and fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 9781590518113
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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