Malik is a very fully realized character, and Fury positively vibrates with intellectual energy (it’s also frequently quite...
Rushdie’s eighth novel, which was commissioned for a recent literary festival held in The Netherlands, is an intensely personal and surpassingly odd performance that bears only incidental resemblance to his recent successes (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999, etc.).
Protagonist Malik Solanka is a 50ish “retired historian of ideas” who’s living in contemporary Manhattan, having left his American (second) wife and young son in London. Malik is wealthy, thanks to profiting obscenely from the commercial success of the “Little Brain” doll, a product spin-off from a popular TV series (also Malik’s creation) in which “Great Minds” dolls engaged historical wise men in fictional dialogues. If that sounds like a stretch, wait till you get a load of such thematically burdened secondary characters as Malik’s feisty mistress Mila Milo (an activist intellectual out to save the world), his secretive sloe-eyed new love Neela Mahendra, and his friend Jack Rhinehart, a dusky former war correspondent who emulates his obvious model Hemingway in more ways than one. The story’s ostensible premise is Malik’s wary détente with the furies (including the classical personified ones, an uncaught serial killer of young women, and the resentful energies of indigent societies) that he sees all around him. But it’s really a framework on which to hang fusillades of commentary on such topical ephemera as the film Gladiator, the newsworthy doings of Elian Gonzalez, Monica Lewinsky, Slobodan Milosevic, Tiger Woods, and others; “George W. Gush’s boredom and Al Bore’s gush,” and anything else that catches Malik’s jaundiced eye. It all reads like a slightly more exotic Saul Bellow novel (there are explicit echoes of both Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet), with perhaps a soupçon of Philip Roth’s angry comedies of waning sexual impulses waxing eloquent.
Malik is a very fully realized character, and Fury positively vibrates with intellectual energy (it’s also frequently quite funny). But it’s still more tirade than novel: Rushdie’s weakest book since his (justly) forgotten first novel (Grimus, 1976).Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46333-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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