MacMurray (1921–1997) was supposedly a great Dickinson fan, but with fans like her, who needs hostile, revisionist critics?
The Emily of the title, last name Dickinson, is an annoying, unpleasant genius, and even her genius is questionable in this literary fiction about a young Amherst woman befriended by the poet.
Mistakenly assumed to have inherited her mother’s tuberculosis, Arethusa Chase spends a lonely childhood in her family’s Boston mansion, her only joy the private tutoring she receives. After her neglectful mother’s death, Arethusa’s father takes her on a recuperative visit to Barbados, where she changes her name to Miranda after acting in The Tempest. The Chases move to Amherst, where Mr. Chase is a professor. After her pert resistance to a local minister’s attempt to have her “profess,” Miranda receives an invitation to visit Emily, already a recluse in her father’s house. Soon, Miranda is expected every Monday. At first, Miranda is bewitched by Emily’s unusual wit, but as time passes, she recognizes Emily’s tendency to be needy, selfish, even spiteful. The snatches of letters and poems included do little to improve Miranda’s, or the reader’s, opinion of the shrewish poet. No matter, Emily’s importance fades as Miranda’s loves and career ambitions take center stage. When her fiancé, Davy, dies in the Civil War, he bequeaths to Miranda a foundation to carry out her progressive ideas on early-childhood education. She begins a school with her former tutor. Meanwhile, her cousin Kate dies and Miranda semi-adopts Kate’s young daughter. Miranda’s independence threatens Emily, who is by turns jealous and distant during Miranda’s now less frequent visits. When Miranda falls in love with the executor of Davy’s estate (his wife, shades of Jane Eyre, alive but incapacitated by brain sickness), Emily manipulates Miranda into confiding the graphic details and then writes an anonymous letter to the board of Miranda’s school attempting to expose the affair. Discovering Emily’s betrayal, Miranda ends the friendship.
MacMurray (1921–1997) was supposedly a great Dickinson fan, but with fans like her, who needs hostile, revisionist critics?Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-01760-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
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
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