A magnum opus from a leading young writer takes on the meaning of exile, identity, faith, and the limits of endurance.
While one man struggles with his origins, a ragged group of wanderers walks across the steppe.
A small band of refugees is walking across the Eurasian steppe. They’d signed up to be ferried, illegally, across the border to a better life. They’d been tricked. Now, they must walk. They are starving to death. One by one, their members drop. Meanwhile, in a small, provincial town far away, a police commissioner named Pontus Beg is growing old. As he goes about clearing up the minor transgressions of his community—a man has run over another man’s sheep—he struggles to make sense of his position in the wider world. What puzzles him is the memory of a song his mother sang to him when he was a child. It’s a Yiddish song; but why would his mother sing a Yiddish song? As Beg uncovers a secret his mother kept from him, a secret that changes the way he understands his own identity, that ever shrinking band of refugees keeps creeping through the steppe. They’re not unlike the Israelites who wandered for 40 years in the wilderness. Gradually, Beg’s story begins to merge with the lonely band’s, a band that includes a tall man, a young boy, an addict, a poacher, an Ethiopian, and a woman. This latest novel from Libris Prize winner Wieringa (Little Caesar, 2012, etc.) is a quiet masterpiece. Wieringa combines the primal, raw, archetypal vision of José Saramago with the apocalyptic sweep of Cormac McCarthy. The result is entirely his own. In Garrett’s elegant translation, Wieringa’s prose is lucid as cut glass, his images stark, his landscape desolate and otherworldly at the same time that it is contemporary. His unalloyed depiction of emigration will reverberate keenly in a Europe facing ever growing numbers of exiles, evacuees, escapees of war. It will reverberate, as well, in a United States muddled by its own border policies. To open the doors or shut them? As it turns out, that’s only one of the questions.
A magnum opus from a leading young writer takes on the meaning of exile, identity, faith, and the limits of endurance.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 9781612195650
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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