A funny and exceptionally well-wrought romance that starts in disaster, ends in tragedy, and never loses sight of the manic...
An assured, entertaining debut about an obituary writer who tries to make his life into something more than a collection of random occurrences.
Scratching out an existence as a very unskilled counselor at a London clinic, 20-something Daniel Linnel isn’t going anywhere. After a series of disastrous patient mishaps, he’s fired—which turns out to be a very good thing. First, he meets Laura, an American who works in a bar called The Owl. Then, he gets a job as an obituarist with a London paper: it seems he’s got a knack for writing about the lives of the dead, an art that’s been perfected by his editor, Whittington, who’s turned the obits into one of the most popular sections of the paper. The narrative follows Daniel as he settles into his new job, and there’s further amusing material as Daniel begins writing obits of people who are still alive but seem likely to drop dead presently—and then he gets an advance for a book that will be called “Who’s Who In Hell,” a compilation of obituaries on charming types like Stalin and Jack the Ripper. The rebellious and free-spirited Laura, meanwhile, has a habit of taking lovers at random and going skydiving, but she seems to like the relatively sedate Daniel, who’s delighted with his writing luck. The two live together and seem to be settling into some semblance of domestic bliss—until the other shoe drops with the unpredictable Laura and Daniel’s work on his dead-people book takes a turn toward the life-threatening. British newcomer Chalmers could have taken his first fiction in many directions—black-comic farce, standard coming-of-ager, Gen-X romance—but happily he keeps his focus on the story of two people who don’t seem right for each other but don’t know what else to do.
A funny and exceptionally well-wrought romance that starts in disaster, ends in tragedy, and never loses sight of the manic and surreal in life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-3924-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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