Earnestly seriocomic, with the “serio” part arriving too late and the “comic” part too intermittently.
A longtime friendship is tested in this comic novel that’s determined to find the elusive humor in matters of rape, suicide, imprisonment, and infanticide.
Aldo and Liam, the alternating narrators of the second novel by Australian author Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole, 2008), were high school classmates whose lives wildly diverged after graduation. Liam became a police officer and aspiring novelist, while Aldo became the kind of person who constantly courts intervention by the authorities. After failing at every day job he’s had and business he launched (including ill-fated porn and dating sites) and divorcing after his wife’s stillbirth, a suicidal Aldo stalks his ex, nearly accidentally smothering the newborn baby she had with another man. Later, he’s paralyzed below the waist (for reasons disclosed late in the novel), which only exacerbates his urge to do himself in. Liam, who first bonded with Aldo because each had lost a sister, does what he can to help, but he has his own marital strains and artistic failures to manage. Laughing yet? The comedy in this story is largely in the telling: Aldo is a fast-talking raconteur, well aware of how much he exhausts everyone around him but unable to stop explaining his serial haplessness. (“At least twice a year a bird flies into my head….When I play a piano, the lid invariably closes on my fingers.”) Toltz tries a variety of rhetorical devices to give this story an antic, irreverent feel—court testimony, conversations with God, police interrogation, poetry—but the overall effect is that of a writer trying too hard to mine unlikely topics for humor. Toltz means to say something about the enduring power of friendship in the face of our foibles and misunderstandings, but his efforts to apply a sincere tone to that theme feel forced and unearned.
Earnestly seriocomic, with the “serio” part arriving too late and the “comic” part too intermittently.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9782-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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