An impressive but structurally unwieldy debut.
Modernity and distances both geographical and psychological upend a South Korean family.
As noted in the indispensible prefatory character list, the Han family is divided into two branches. The American offshoot is headed by Han Hyun-kyu, a New York City surgeon whose marriage to alcoholic psychiatrist Lee Woo-in is foundering. Their two adult children, sensitive Henry, recently released from rehab, and his photojournalist sister Jane, on leave after her near-fatal brush with an I.E.D. in Baghdad, have more trauma in store—their parents’ impending breakup. Meanwhile, in South Korea, Hyun-kyu’s younger brother Jae-Kyu, also a surgeon, is leading a prosperous but not unduly ostentatious life in a small farming town. But the surface tranquility of the Korean Hans masks dark undercurrents. Jae-Kyu’s pregnant daughter Min-yung is closeted in her childhood bedroom, suffering from a mysterious illness—or is it just the unexplained absence of her feckless husband Woo-sung? Jae-Kyu’s spouse Jung-joo, with the help of housekeeper Cho Jin-sook, runs a household as tightly buttoned-down as her inner life. Exposition filtered through multiple points of view takes up much novelistic space, but the action accelerates when the Korean Hans receive a surprise visit from Jae-Kyu’s American brother, who’s gone AWOL from job and family. Seasoned globetrotter Jane handily tracks down Hyun-kyu and follows him to Korea, where they eventually wear out their welcome. Jane and Min-yung forge an instantaneous connection that has disastrous consequences. Although Chung occasionally relies too much on sudden death to add pathos, her characters are well drawn, particularly the women (except for Jane, who seems to have been plucked from another novel). But the sheer proliferation of voices clamoring to be heard mutes the narrative power, as does the overly complex subdivision of this short work into books, sections and subsections.
An impressive but structurally unwieldy debut.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9962-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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