One doubt Muir doesn’t quell is whether such a fanciful treatise has a chance of enlightening that organism, but she...
An eccentric bestiary that playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction.
Muir (The Book of Telling, 2005, etc.), an academic, poet and essayist, combines fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist named Sophie who has the ability to see invisible creatures. Without getting too didactic, each tale conveys a lesson about the beauty, fragility and complexity of living things. Humor and barbs come through in comments on politics, Wall Street and other subjects. There’s an invisible jackass that kicks people intent on making deals and money. “The Spiders of Theodora” offers Swiftian satire on the customs of a town like Washington, D.C. The sad “The Foster Fowl” touches on climate change and the role of even caring humans in hastening extinction. In "The Oormz," that cloudlike being drapes its faint cashmere self comfortingly over Sophie’s head and shoulders, helping dispel dark moods and recall memories of “the first spring I’d ever seen.” “The Golden Egg” is a marvelous capsule of natural history spanning many eons. “The Hypnogator,” with its mesmerizing reptile, stands out as one of the few tales (“The Foster Fowl” is another) with the heft of a good short story, not to mention crackling suspense. Sophie sometimes consults her biologist sister, Evie, who adds to a stratum of science that runs through the fantasy like a long, faith-building footnote for the dubious reader. In stark moments, the real world sounds like this: The “mass extinction” of species “is the only one caused by a single organism capable of seeing the big picture, understanding its own destructive role, and changing that.”
One doubt Muir doesn’t quell is whether such a fanciful treatise has a chance of enlightening that organism, but she deserves a good-size audience to give the experiment a fair shot.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-934137-80-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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