Hellenga’s delicacy and insight redeem what might have been a mere retrospective rehash of Pleasures.
Hellenga (Philosophy Made Simple, 2006, etc.) returns to Florence, the setting of his celebrated first novel (The Sixteen Pleasures, 1994), this time to chronicle the fictional (so far) production of the movie version of said novel.
Film rights to The Sixteen Pleasures, Margot Harrington’s memoir of her youthful adventures as a book conservator after the 1966 Florentine floods, have finally emerged from turnaround hell. Margot and her new lover, Woody, a classics professor whose daughter was killed in a terrorist attack at a Bologna train station, are writing the screenplay. Producer Esther has her own script, which “dumbs down” Margot’s story of her discovery of that book of 16 erotic sonnets with illustrations, and her bittersweet affair with Italian lothario Sandro, into a conventional romantic comedy, The Italian Lover. Everyone “above the line” on this picture has issues: Margot is facing intimations of lonely old age; Woody is ambivalent about remaining in Italy after he is sued for rescuing an abused dog; Esther is reeling from her recent divorce. Director Michael is dying of prostate cancer; his wife Beryl’s total immersion in Italian permits an (almost) guilt-free fling with Zanni, who’s starring as Sandro. Leading lady Miranda, who plays 29-year-old Margot, is disappointed that her screen lover Zanni prefers an older woman, and she sides with Margot in the clash of the dueling screenplays. Large chunks of filmmaking how-to may appeal only to movie mavens, but Hellenga expounds on technique to illuminate subtext, as when “middling director” Michael, striving for a final masterpiece, attempts an Altmanesque tracking shot and is stranded on a malfunctioning crane high above the Piazza Degli Uffizi. Hellenga doesn’t always heed Michael’s storytelling advice, “Intentionality is the enemy.” The characters’ actions often seem arbitrary and stage-directed, such as Beryl’s abrupt retreat to fidelity. The mood is meditative since Margot and the other principals are saying “goodbye to all that,” whatever, in each case, “that” may be.
Hellenga’s delicacy and insight redeem what might have been a mere retrospective rehash of Pleasures.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-11763-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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