The second (This Earth of Mankind, 1991) in a quartet continues the often bittersweet story of the growing anticolonial movement in the Dutch-ruled Indonesia of the 1890's. As before, the novel is first told in oral form in a prison camp in 1973—a process that may be responsible for the uneven quality of the work, which veers from pedestrian passages on capitalism, colonialism, and local events to stunning vignettes of men and women destroyed by the pervasive Dutch presence. Minke, the narrator, picks up where he left off. His young wife, Annelies Mellema—daughter of a wealthy Dutch settler and a native concubine—has been sent to live in Holland—according to the terms of her father's will—and her marriage declared invalid. Then a grief-stricken Annelies dies, and back home Minke and mother-in-law Mama try to make new lives for themselves. Sometime journalist Minke plans to be a doctor, but friends like Jean Marais, a French artist, and Kommer, a mixed-blood—the Dutch, as they did in South Africa, specialized in racial classifications—advise him to write in Javanese, not Dutch, and to get to know the country people. Which he does in a desultory way: He learns how Dutch sugar planters stole land from the peasants; how a young woman deliberately infected herself with smallpox so that her Dutch master would die; and how the Mellema fortune itself is tainted. And in a series of set pieces—culminating in the stinging rebuke of colonialism that he and Mama deliver to the Mellema heir who's come from Holland to claim his inheritance—Minke begins to fight at last. A grand concept—as well as a searing indictment of an often cruel and malevolent regime—but Toer's agenda is more political treatise than a window into the human heart.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-12726-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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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