Lots to chew on, but hard to digest.
Elderkin, whose debut (the award-winning Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, 2000) painted a lyric picture of the Arizona desert, now delves into the mysteries of the Australian outback.
The story concerns a young man who hears voices that derive either from his schizophrenia or from his special relationship with the Aboriginal spirits that inhabit the landscape. At the start, Billy wakes up in a hospital bed, having attacked an American tourist on a train after being found wandering along the tracks. The doctors assigned to his case consider insanity his defense against assault charges. His Aboriginal nurse Cecily, however, lets him know in subtle ways that she believes other forces caused his wandering and the strange mutilation of his privates (if it is mutilation, not primitive improvement to his manhood). Elderkin intercuts Billy’s recovery process with his buried memories of a childhood spent with his distant mother and pitiful father in an isolated community being dragged into the modern world by an unscrupulous developer. She also offers the perspective of forces of nature—like the wind—as if they were actual characters that watch over Billy (unless they’re merely voices in this head). In particular, there is the Aboriginal girl—or spirit of a girl—Maisie, who draws the young Billy into her world. Shortly after the boy Billy discovers that his mother is having an affair, he takes Maisie for a joyride in one of his father’s cars and runs into a kangaroo. Distraught, he leaves the outback, becomes a miner, and finds himself platonically involved with a young mother of three. But the forces of nature, which Billy perceives as voices, follow him and draw him back to the land, where he undergoes a transformation—or nervous breakdown. If this all sounds confusing, it is. Tottering between spiritual gobbledygook and psychobabble, Elderkin nevertheless does create lush exotic worlds, although an unfortunate undercurrent of polemic weakens the mystery of what has happened to Billy.
Lots to chew on, but hard to digest.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1757-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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