One thing after another in a novel that wallows in excess.
A bloated first novel from Australia.
The opening promises suspense. Narrator Jasper Dean is in prison; his father’s body, he confides, will never be found. The suggestion of foul play, though, is a misleading tease. Moving back in time, the father, Martin, takes over as narrator; he and Jasper switch roles throughout. Martin tells of growing up in a bush town dominated by a prison. He and his younger half-brother Terry ask its most hardened criminal to mentor them in a life of crime. Terry is a quick study and starts killing sports celebrities tainted by drugs or bribes; he’s an overnight sensation in sports-mad Australia, but is eventually caught and locked up. Martin’s mother is dying of cancer while feeding Martin rat poison (don’t ask); then both parents die in a fire which also destroys Terry and the town. Martin escapes to Paris and meets kooky Astrid; they make a baby (Jasper) before Astrid kills herself and Martin returns to Australia with Jasper. They have a complicated love-hate relationship, originating in Martin’s belief that “this baby is me prematurely reincarnated.” Martin is as weird as Terry was violent. We now get a second coming-of-age story, Jasper’s, which is upstaged by Martin’s antics; these make him as hated by his fellow Australians as Terry was loved. Toltz sometimes paints with a broad brush on a large canvas, sometimes highlights the minutiae of messy relationships: In neither area is he convincing. His plot twists include suicides (five) and transformations. He whisks father and son off to Thailand, where there are huge surprises. A dead character has been alive all along! A lifelong friend is in fact a bitter enemy! We end, exhausted, back in Australia.
One thing after another in a novel that wallows in excess.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52172-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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