Stowe (Not the End of the World, 1992) again explores family dysfunction, but this smart, carefully written second novel is much more than its subject: It's brittle and sharp, poignant and tough- minded, a balancing act that takes a breathtaking aesthetic risk. Stowe's narrator, Ginger Moore, is also much more than her rÇsumÇ: a middle-aged divorced New Yorker who writes biographies of obscure female figures in English literature whose talents went unnoticed or unfulfilled. For all of her relentless self-criticism, and her reflexive sarcasm, she's no whiner, partly because she's a duty-bound midwestern WASP. Her Christmas trip to Michigan—a pilgrimage that lends the book structure—also stirs up various revelations about family resentments and secrets. Her mother, Virginia, a former southern belle, now wallows in desperation and need, and an ``insatiable appetite for vodka'' that developed after the accidental death of her third child. Ginger's 41-year old brother, Cease (for Cecil), is bitter, sardonic, consumed by his hatred for his mother, secretly blaming himself for both his brother's death and his mother's retreat into booze. Meanwhile, Cecil Sr., a wealthy retired lawyer, enjoys his willed oblivion— his gentle jokes and his everyday routines. Admittedly ``intense,'' Ginger approaches the holidays with customary dread—this is a family who watches Psycho on Christmas Eve, after all. What makes the novel so compelling are the voices distilled through Ginger's consciousness: her smart-mouthed boyfriend, a hot young Dennis Leary-like comic; her Panel of Judges, a superego drawn from literary history; and her own overwrought intelligence. She scrutinizes the world, and her family history, with Jamesian intensity only to discover its transparency, which also makes her suspicious of all the pop insights that might otherwise define (and neatly dismiss) this screwed-up brood. Further proof that art often emerges from the most ordinary materials, transformed by style, humor, and grace.
Pub Date: June 20, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42066-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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