A scabrous underside of the American Way of Life is examined here...and left undiagnosed. The book is chock-a-block with the author's talent, and some powerful passages indicate critical acceptance (or at least attention) but no foreseeable readership. All the characters with any sensitivity are alcoholic, drugaddicted or psychiatric losers. All the officials or employers exhibit moronic brutality or worse, a paranoid urge toward dictatorship. Reinhardt is the central figure, a boozed out ex-musician turned wandering disc jockey. He picks up Geraldine, a knife-scarred teenage widow from the West Virginia hill country. Then, there's Rainey, a psychological wreck with all the sins of the South on his soul, recovering from a nervous breakdown with a nerve-shattering job as a welfare investigator. These three and numerous grotesques all come together and give each other the willies in a tumble down apartment building in New Orleans during the numb aftermath of a recent Mardi Gras. Rainey suspects evil forces and it turns out that Reinhardt works for them. He cynically acts as master of ceremonies at a monstrous rally which the owner of his station sponsors as an exercise in inciting patriotic frenzy. Rainey is destroyed trying to stop it and Geraldine is driven to suicide by it. Reinhardt understands it all and prepares to drift again. Geraldine's entrapment in urban society is the only touching reality. There are wild stretches of genuine dark humor the best of which include a double-dyed fake minister and some Negroes attempting to beat the city relief rolls. It's not the material best or even steady sellers are made of, but the author is worth watching.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1966
ISBN: 0140098348
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1966
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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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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