Boyle's fourth story collection follows his highly successful novel, The Road to Wellville (1993), which will be released this summer or fall as a movie starring Anthony Hopkins. Each of these 15 stories is sharply done, brightly worded, and edged with black humor. A take-off on Hemingway's ``A Natural History of the Dead'' called ``The 100 Faces of Death, Vol. V'' is a grisly compilation of odd ways to die. The title story may be the best in that it has the book's most memorable character, a Russian immigrant woman who takes advantage of the wimpy California narrator, indulges in shopper's paradise and long-distance calls, but, ultimately, yearns for a lover ``to die for.'' Perhaps the funniest is ``Filthy with Things,'' which tells of a wife and her husband who cannot move about their house because it's so full of collectibles—so much so that a professional organizer, or ``specialist in aggregation disorders,'' must be called in to straighten out the impossibly crammed house, porch, and lawn. ``Big Game'' limns a fake African hunting ground located outside Bakersfield, California, where the stupidly wealthy can shoot zebras and lions. In ``Carnal Knowledge'' the foolish narrator is suckered by a beautiful ecoterrorist into liberating a turkey farm just before Thanksgiving. ``Acts of God'' depicts an aged, fairly recently married and put-upon retiree whose harridan wife gets hit by a well-deserved tropical hurricane. And so they go. As magazine fiction, a sheaf of amusing, smartly crafted tales, but none of these stories has the crushing moment of wisdom that comes from the writer's ribs and sticks for life. Irony is not enough. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84963-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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