The common threads of female experience are laid down clearly enough, but in a curiously intellectualized and dispassionate...
Veteran Indian author Deshpande's second novel to be published here is not a huge improvement over the first (A Matter of Time, 1999). Talky and rather listless, the narrative concerns a young middle-class woman in India who overcomes despair caused by the death of her infant daughter by involving herself in the family of a comatose rape victim and reading the journals of her long-dead mother-in-law. Urmi’s nerves are jangled by any reference to baby Anu, but a chance encounter with Shakutai, the mother of a teenaged girl hospitalized after being raped and beaten, makes her aware that others are as miserable as she. Although from different classes and generations, she and Shakutai share something deeper, and looking after the mother and daughter gives Urmi time away from her thoughts. She also has begun to consider the unpublished writings of her mother-in-law. Journals revealing that Mira was forced into an unwanted marriage have prompted Urmi to view her poetry very differently and to see her death in childbirth as particularly tragic. When Urmi persuades Shakutai to take her daughter's story public in order to find the rapist, the result is yet another tragedy, but somehow the women find the means to carry on.
The common threads of female experience are laid down clearly enough, but in a curiously intellectualized and dispassionate way, and a flood of undeveloped characters doesn't make the story any easier to read.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55861-267-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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