Still, Bausch’s expansive, and somewhat exhausting, ninth novel (after In the Night Season, 1998) is a bold attempt at...
The conflicted love life and intellectual life of a woman coming to maturity in the ’90s is juxtaposed with her imagined account of the experiences of 19th-century British explorer—and author of Travels in West Africa—Mary Kingsley.
Virginian Lily Austin, daughter of two successful stage actors, drifts through college vaguely planning to act or write, eventually falling for her roommate’s charismatic half-brother Tyler Harrison, and, after their marriage, moving with him to the Mississippi home of their family, the Galatierres. Simultaneously, Lily researches the Victorian adventuress’s exploits, plans a play about Kingsley, writes “letters” to her in an ongoing journal, and dreams, as it were, the latter’s history. These Victorian materials then alternate with the lengthy processes whereby Lily discovers Tyler’s emotional and marital failings and the truth about the paternity of her baby daughter (named, inevitably, Mary), then strikes out on her own determined to become a woman as independent as her 19th-century idol. Only some of this works. The chapters focused on Mary Kingsley tell the increasingly absorbing story of a “spirited” woman who shrugs off her culture’s ideas about woman’s proper place and makes increasingly dangerous trips to the Canary Islands, Sierra Leone, and the African mainland, encountering patronizing males, locusts, hungry crocodiles, jungle fever, and worse, finally journeying further southward (and proclaiming, in a passage in Lily’s play spoken after her death, that “I came down to Cape Town, in South Africa, to die”). The problem is that Kingsley’s heroic struggles with her culture’s chauvinism and sexism do not in any credible way resemble Lily’s soap-operatic stumbling toward fulfillment. The two women’s stories thus neither mirror each other nor thematically connect, as Bausch obviously intends.
Still, Bausch’s expansive, and somewhat exhausting, ninth novel (after In the Night Season, 1998) is a bold attempt at something different, and, as such, his most interesting thus far.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019295-X
Page Count: 656
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
