A disturbing and heartbreaking novel that deserves a wide audience.
A subtle, heart-rending Estonian novel about a father in the last few months of his life trying to reconstruct the circumstances of his daughter’s suicide.
Enn Padrik is the father and the narrator of this story, which has been translated from the Estonian in straightforward, engaging prose. Five years after his daughter, Anni, died mysteriously along with three other people, he finds out he’s dying of cancer and wants to put together the pieces of this cryptic puzzle. All four died in a fire at a commune, but it was determined that by the time the fire started they were already dead, “lying side by side...in the master bedroom…a small packed suitcase lying beside each of them.” In his limited remaining time, Padrik seeks out other members of the commune as well as people who interacted with Anni before she went there. The novel has a Rashomon-like feel as Padrik comes to realize that accounts about Anni diverge, and no single perspective suffices to explain her life and death. We get different facets of her personality, for example, from friends recalling Anni’s own reminiscences about her life in Paris, where she had been working on a research project about Eastern European prostitutes, from a man named Erik who attended a Christian youth camp with Anni, and finally, and most movingly, from Carola, who had been at the Birchback commune, was supposed to have been the fifth person involved in the mass suicide, and had escaped. Raud (The Brother, 2016, etc.) treats his narrator and all of his interviewees with respect and allows them to tell their versions of Anni’s story. It turns out there are no easy—and ultimately no satisfying—answers to explain Anni’s transformation from a bright young schoolgirl to a member of what amounted to a religious cult.
A disturbing and heartbreaking novel that deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: April 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-91658-380-4
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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