As if the Bukowski corpus was watered down for television.
Drunks do stupid things in this debut.
In “Snow Fever,” diner cook Bill Kane embarks on a drunken orgy of cooking, trying to express in seafood what he can’t say in words. Linda Hartley is an advice columnist with problems of her own, mostly with romance; in “Love Him, Petaluma,” she leads a sad-sack Easter parade from one tavern to another. Harlin Wilder is a ne’er-do-well’s ne’er-do-well: Not only has he been incarcerated for his own mostly petty, mostly avoidable crimes, but, in “Newspaper Clipping,” he ends up in jail after his twin brother, Cyrus, steals some chicken wings. These characters are just a few of the regulars at Lucy’s, a bar in small-town upstate New York. All of them are losers of more or less the same type; that is, they are men and women whose defining quality is being a bar regular. To call the tales of their misadventures and misdeeds “A Novel in Stories” is misleading. The stories do share a common setting, but there is no unifying narrative, nor is there a dynamic interaction between the stories that would make this collection more than the sum of its parts. When she shifts focus to allow a new character to take center stage, Barry offers a peripheral view of her cast of regulars, but this new perspective offers no new insight; it simply reinforces what we already know about them. Indeed, readers get to know these characters about as well as barflies get to know each other. We learn what they boast about and what they complain about; we learn who’s slept with whom; and we learn what everybody likes to drink. But we never see these characters as real people. Instead, they remain cogs in a wan assortment of tritely quirky and supposedly illuminating anecdotes.
As if the Bukowski corpus was watered down for television.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-4165-3524-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
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
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