Skilled and graceful from page to page, but the story, even so, dawdles badly and seems dragged out and terribly verbose by...
Plodding account of a young girl’s coming of age during the 1918 flu epidemic, in a third US appearance by New Zealander Johnson (Belief, 2002, etc.).
As the carnage of WWI was winding down, one of history’s great pandemics took more lives in a few months than the Allied and German armies had claimed over the previous four years. The Spanish Influenza spread to just about every corner of the globe—even the Fiji Islands, where 12-year-old Olive McNab lives with her large family. When Olive’s mother Adela, a once-famous actress, falls ill, Olive and her brothers leave their parents behind in Suva (the capital city) and travel with their grandmother to the remote island of Taveuni to stay at Uncle Bernard Gow’s sugar plantation. There, they pass their days in mild unease, waiting for word on the last days of the war, the epidemic, and their mother’s worsening condition. For a time, they enjoy the diversion of two eccentric (by their standards) houseguests: the free-spirited artist Agnes Perkins-Green and her lover, the famous naturalist and explorer Constance Prime-Belcher. Although Uncle Bernard’s sister Elvira was a devotee (and possibly lover) of the English poet Rupert Brooke, the Gow household is for the most part a dull and provincial place, where life revolves around meals and sports and the atmosphere is suffused with a sense of colonial superiority to the small army of native servants and laborers who stand on every side. The stagnant peace of this world is suddenly shattered when Olive’s Aunt Maud nearly foments an uprising among the natives by slashing the face of a serving-boy with a piece of broken glass. Her ensuing trial, Adela’s inevitable death, and the signing of the Armistice combine to impress upon the young Olive the fact that she has entered a new world, at once frightening and hopeful.
Skilled and graceful from page to page, but the story, even so, dawdles badly and seems dragged out and terribly verbose by the end.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30693-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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