The notorious re-telling (originally published in Italian in 1995) of Lolita in the words of the nymphet herself who drove Humbert Humbert beyond all constraint. Result: a mix of wit and tedium in near-equal parts. The wit appears early, as 12-year-old Dolores Maze (as opposed to Haze) describes her 1946 home life in Goatscreek, New Hampshire, no seducer yet in sight. When Lo was four, her little brother of two was electrocuted (tossed like “a piece of toast popped out of the toaster” by a downed wire). Lo’s father, before his own abrupt end in 1945, reacted by killing lizards in a miniature electric chair in the garage. Her mother, a widow at 35, stared at the ceiling while Lo herself explored the world of scent (“I had spent the whole summer sniffing my mother’s feet and collecting spiders”). Into this world of wacky sadness enters the French academic gentleman Humbert Guibert as a paying roomer—a point after which much of the book’s charm flees as the necessities of its inherited script take over: as Lo is transformed into a sexual veteran at summer camp; as Humbert marries her mother so as to keep access to Lo; as her mother then dies (was she murdered by Humbert?); and as Humbert picks Lo up from the summer camp to embark upon a year’s car-odyssey across the US, during which time his “sex-slave” Lo is mostly bored by her keeper, though she does obediently keep the “travel log”of sights that Hummie “assigns” her, sounding in it often far too old for her age, as she does also when the duo alights in Ithaca, New York, and Lo becomes struck by the stage—before fleeing with a hyperbolically seedy practitioner of same. Nabokov’s novel, with its own excellences and scandal, was also a thing of its real historic moment; while Pera’s retake of it gains life, in the main, as an already dated curiosity. (First printing of 40,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-9643740-1-3
Page Count: 293
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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