Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction.
A lively translation of postwar stories from Kono (1926-2015), a Japanese master of the unsettling.
There is a moment in the collection’s penultimate story, “Conjurer,” when the protagonist, Hisako, thinks back to a fight she witnessed between her married friends. They were vehemently arguing about whether a magic show they’d seen was real, and Hisako agreed to buy a ticket to the show to help settle their dispute. As she ponders the couple, she thinks, “They’d been forced to acknowledge something in each of them and also something about their very relationship that they’d been unconsciously avoiding, and, forced to become aware of it, they felt betrayed.” This moment shines a light backward on the rest of the collection: Kono’s specialty is this avoidance of the unconscious and the moments when the darkness of her characters’ psyches finally spills out. In the title story, a childless woman balances a violent misanthropy with an obsession with very young boys. In the opener, “Night Journey,” a couple walks across town to visit friends with whom they’ve tentatively agreed to swap spouses. The Twilight Zone–esque “Final Moments” explores what happens when a woman bargains with death for an extra 26 hours to live. In “Bone Meat,” a woman whose boyfriend has left her becomes increasingly haunted by seemingly mundane objects—clothes, oyster shells—that push her toward destruction. Kono, who died in 2015, structures most of her stories similarly, with an unsettling flashback at the center of a story told in chronological time to show the ways that the dark seeds of our actions are planted, often unwittingly. And though the structures of the stories repeat and the protagonists resemble each other, each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary.
Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2827-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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