Ferré at her best (as in Eccentric Neighborhoods) can be a soaring, marvelous writer. But Flight of the Swan never gets off...
Ferré bases her third novel written in English on a real historical incident: ballerina Anna Pavlova’s prolonged stay in Puerto Rico (where she was performing) when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917.
What a bland, disappointing book, almost totally devoid of the swirling momentum and vivid specificity that made Ferré’s generational sagas The House on the Lagoon (1995) and Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998) so memorable. Not that “Madame” (as she’s addressed by her former student and all-purpose handmaiden Masha, who narrates) isn’t a charismatic and appealing figure: a woman of pronounced populist sentiments despite the image projected by her trademark “ . . . solo The Dying Swan . . . [as] the personification of the aristocrats’ agony.” The problems are created by the heavy weight of exposition that clogs the first hundred pages, and by imperfectly made connections between Pavlova’s love affair with (the much younger) revolutionary dilettante Diamantino Marquez (“For the first time Madame was insisting that Love was more important than Art,” Masha complains), and an awkward subplot in which Diamantino’s arranged marriage to an heiress is threatened by the presence of his rival, her father’s illegitimate son. The inflamed passions and colorful set pieces (including climactic doings at the Juan Ponce De Lémon Carnival) do help, but can’t overcome a superfluity of undigested research, which frequently takes the form of leaden references to the ballerina’s contemporaries (Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, et al), and largely pointless cameo appearances by such celebrities as “Lone Eagle” American pilot Daniel Dearborn (in other words, Charles Lindbergh). One gets the impression that Ferré undertook this novel without having decided how Anna Pavlova, the Russian Revolution, the class struggle in Puerto Rico, and a woman’s right to express herself artistically and sexually (a constant undercurrent theme) were logically—much less fictionally—related.
Ferré at her best (as in Eccentric Neighborhoods) can be a soaring, marvelous writer. But Flight of the Swan never gets off the ground.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15648-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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