Entertaining and gripping.
Disaster is the rule in this aptly titled, darkly comic debut collection.
From Kenya and India to the Deep South and Fire Island, Watkins’s 12 stories deal with coming of age, at any age. He has a gift for making the improbable totally believable. In “Critterworld,” three brainy boys plot to kill a roadside elephant only to have it die of natural causes and land on a VW, trapping a little girl inside; the zany plot works because each character, including the elephant, is given a strong personality. When a widower spending the summer in a town called Kismet comes upon a drowned man washed up on the beach in “Bocky-Bocky,” it somehow seems probable that Sam would fold the man’s body into a yoga position called “the Corpse.” And when Uma Thurman, another yoga devotee, jogs over, her baseball cap pulled low on her forehead, what else could she possibly do other than help Sam pretzel the dead man into more positions, all the while prattling on about the corpse’s flexibility in her thick New York accent? Though hilarious, the story also touches on Sam’s grief for his wife and his banishment from his teenage daughter’s private world. The author’s work always conveys something of the absurd. In “Kafka’s Sister,” a failed social activist goes to an ashram in India and nearly kills himself by fasting, giving away his food to children who rob him. In the title story, a boy whose father died in a car accident decides that the definition of human kindness is old Mr. Montford allowing him to get a head start out of the junkyard (where he was looking at the wreckage of his father’s car) before sending the dogs after him.
Entertaining and gripping.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-87074-512-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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