A rambling novel about regret strays too close, too often, to self-pity.
An Arab Israeli man reckons with the mistake that determined the course of his life.
The narrator of Kashua’s (Native, 2017, etc.) latest novel is a writer, of sorts. He ghostwrites memoirs for the clients who seek him out—most of them elderly, most of them Jewish. Occasionally he inserts his own memories among their narratives. He himself is Arab and for most of the novel goes unnamed; eventually, though, a minor character asks, “Are you Saeed?” and he answers, “Yes.” Saeed grew up in Tira, a Palestinian village in Israel. At some point, something went wrong, and Saeed left for Jerusalem. Now, he and his wife and children live in Illinois, and it’s been almost 20 years since he’s seen the rest of his family. It’s Saeed’s mistake, whatever it was, that Kashua is primarily concerned with. He circles around it, revealing details only gradually. If he meant for this strategy to hold the reader in suspense, he isn’t entirely successful: The result feels too drawn out, as if we’ve been strung along for too long, with too little to show for it. Saeed’s mistake has to do with a short story he wrote years ago, and his wife, it turns out, was the primary victim. So it’s unfortunate that his wife, whose name is Palestine, never emerges as a fully-fledged character. Saeed has nothing more insightful to say about her than that “she’s beautiful, so beautiful,” and she never gets to speak for herself. The most moving parts of the book, in fact, don’t have to do with Saeed’s mistake at all. These are the descriptions of the prejudice and discrimination Saeed faces at the hands of his Jewish colleagues, a topic that Kashua has already written about, more effectively, elsewhere.
A rambling novel about regret strays too close, too often, to self-pity.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4789-9
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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