Galloway’s high-altitude romance, for all its intensity, is not enough to sustain a full-length novel.
The life story of a high-wire artist, in a US debut from Canadian second-novelist Galloway.
Salvo Ursari is a Rom (gypsy). As a nine-year-old in the Hungary of 1919, he watches a gadje (non-Roma) mob burn down the family home; his parents die in the fire, but Salvo escapes to Budapest. These early scenes, interwoven with Romany folk tales, show a resilient culture fighting ethnic oppressors. Everything changes when the teenaged Salvo sees his first wire act and meets the mysterious impresario Tomas Skosa. The latter realizes Salvo is a natural, though he proves a cruel taskmaster. Immobility is the key, says Skosa: “make the wire yours.” Thus begins the romance between artist and wire; in a large cast of one-dimensional characters, they are the only two that matter. On the ground Salvo is a dour neurotic; in the air he is the epitome of grace. Not that the ground is all bad: Salvo will have a joyful reunion with siblings he had given up for dead, and they will become part of the act. Eventually, they run afoul of the Gestapo but are saved by a job offer from America’s top circus impresario, and enjoy a sensational debut in New York. The huge clan that runs the circus, however, is riddled with feuds; when one of the clan, Anna, falls for and marries Salvo, she is promptly disinherited. But Galloway’s attempts to flesh out the Ursaris’ acrobatics into a circus novel complete with Big Tent politics are too superficial to work. As for Anna, only years later does she realize the wire complements Salvo in a way she cannot; by now (it’s 1959) their twin daughters are part of an eight-member troupe. When the girls die in a too-risky maneuver, Anna’s anger with Salvo borders on hate. Later, Salvo himself will meet his end on a wire between the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
Galloway’s high-altitude romance, for all its intensity, is not enough to sustain a full-length novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1208-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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