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BOB HONEY SINGS JIMMY CRACK CORN

Name: BOB HONEY SINGS JIMMY CRACK CORN
Author: Sean Penn
ISBN: 978-1-64428-058-4

by Sean Penn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.

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Actor/director Penn continues his foray into fiction with this shaggy dog yarn of a secret agent–turned–freelance dispenser of justice.

Bob Honey is a man with a plan. When last we saw him, in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018), the enigmatic killer was being hauled off to the pen; now, having “opted for fugitive flight,” he’s the subject of a manhunt. He goes blackface, a disguise that a grimace-inducing fellow agent in like garb sees right through, first muttering, “When a black man use soap, his skin dry ashen,” then dropping the patois to say, “You just look like a crazy white guy with tar all over his face.“ Honey tries again, this time going in drag on the Acela train to Washington and speaking in falsetto to a senator who once did right by the downtrodden but then became a supporter of the “flim-flamming finger fucker” who won the 2016 election, for which, Bob thinks, he deserves death by mallet, Bob’s favorite instrument. Penn risks crossing over the boundaries of political incorrectness at many points, from those incidents to the very title of the book (which comes from a song of slave resistance that celebrates “cranium cracked and plashed on a pulverizing plantation stone” ). He’ll likely be tarred as an incorrigible member of the Hollywood elite as his tale winds to its close with the explosive destruction of the White House in a scene that might have been an outtake from Fight Club, spectacular but strange, perfectly in keeping with the feel of the rest of the book. It’s all very much of a piece with its predecessor, complete with sometimes-unnecessary footnotes and bursts of alliterative language (“Trees that seem to masturbate an ejaculation of wounds wishing and longing for Lennon’s laments”) that seem to be there for their own sake rather than to move the story along.

It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64428-058-4

Page Count: 168

Publisher: Rare Bird Books

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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A JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM

by A.B. Yehoshua ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 1999

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The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999

ISBN: 0-385-48882-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ONLY DAUGHTER
by A.B. Yehoshua ; translated by Stuart Schoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TUNNEL
by A.B. Yehoshua translated by Stuart Schoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EXTRA
by A.B. Yehoshua translated by Stuart Schoffman

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THE PEARL

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 1947

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Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.