A sleek, nearly hypnotic glimpse into the world of a Korean family ruptured in translation to America.
A ghostlike first novel follows the dispirited meanderings of a Korean-American woman in downtown Manhattan as she investigates the murder of her grocery-owner parents five years before.
At 29, Suzy Park works as an interpreter in the court system and wonders what to do with the rest of her life after dropping out of Barnard College in her senior year to live with a much older (and Caucasian) professor of East Asian art, Damian Biscoe. Four years later, her parents, who disowned her when she left school, are murdered in their Bronx grocery store (“a professional job”), leaving Suzy and her older sister, Grace, orphans in the American immigrant sea; by now she’s left Damian and embarked on an ambitionless quest for temporary work and the disembodied solace of being mistress to unavailable, married men. Hang-up calls pursue her, and the mysterious delivery of a bouquet of irises (her mother’s favorite flower) on the anniversary of her parents’ death (along with her vain attemps to contact her chilly, estranged sister) prompt her to delve into the Korean-American communities of the city in search of the true motivation behind the murder. Were her parents informers for the INS? Was beautiful, aloof Grace flirting with the Korean underworld? Although newcomer Kim is a precise, patient observer, her narrative is slow to get going, endlessly repetitive, and overall deadening, energy-less. But as Suzy begins to examine her nomadic childhood under her emotionally hostile parents who slaved seven-day weeks at their various stores and demanded embittering obedience from their wayward daughters, the story gains its smart momentum.
A sleek, nearly hypnotic glimpse into the world of a Korean family ruptured in translation to America.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17713-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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