Though certainly a failure—ponderous, unpaced, lurching, implausible—poet Olson's second work of fiction (The Life of Jesus was his first) nonetheless has about it an imagistic, visionary hunger that's striking, that sets it apart. A young woman, Melinda, is dying of cancer; her husband Allen, to obtain Laetrile for her, has recourse to a drug-dealer named Richard, who extracts in return Allen's promise to deliver cocaine on his trek from California to Cape Cod, where Melinda was born and now wishes to die. But Allen opts out of the courier-job; instead, to finance the trip, he works the golf courses they pass as a hustler, winning large bets through the skill of his game. In Arizona, he and Melinda meet up with an Indian named Bob White, who then accompanies them east, talking of a Cape Cod golf course run by a relative. This course, Seaview, is built on Indian tribal land—and it's here that the book concludes on a note of apocalypse: Indians staging a siege of the course, Richard stalking Allen in revenge for being burned, a nude-beach protest, Melinda meanwhile dying. True, such ungainliness—if speeded up—would deliver comedy. But Olson slows it down instead. And though certain scenes are just awful—Allen and Melinda making love while the Laetrile drips intravenously into her arm, a symbol-laced game of miniature golf, the climax—a few are spookily clear and magical: Bob White's explanation of what immortality actually involves; and the explanation of golf as a model for the invisibly drawn lines of everyday human effort. ("You had to do something here that locked most everything else out of here so that you could get to something over there, and when you got over there you had to do the same thing over again.") Indeed, this golf imagery—despite the pawky golf scenes themselves—is a distinct poetic achievement. Unfortunately, however, the disastrous overload of the rest—with Olson attempting to put Indians, cancer, golf, and drugs in one lumpy narrative package—means that only intrepid, boredom-tolerant readers will come upon the genuinely fine moments here.
Pub Date: March 1, 1982
ISBN: 0976631164
Page Count: 322
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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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