Not Voinovich’s very best, but a welcome addition to a brilliantly subversive and hugely entertaining body of work.
The great Russian satirist (Moscow 2042, 1987, etc.) observes a devoted Stalinist’s difficult passage through the years that follow the toppling of her idol.
When Khruschchev’s 1962 speech denounces Stalin for anti-Leninist tendencies, former District Party Secretary Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina cries foul. A true believer of formidable steadfastness, Aglaya had even, during the glorious war years, blown up her husband Andrei in an explosion engineered to repel German invaders. Removed from her post by newer apparatchiks, Aglaya broods, frets, meditates revenge—and when the statue of Stalin installed at her behest in her hometown of Dolgov is slated for demolition, Aglaya persuades a phlegmatic tractor-driver to deliver the cast-iron monument to her apartment. Voinovich, a character in his own novel, chats amiably with the reader as he explores Aglaya’s subsequent adventures and relationships, offering deadpan deconstructions of all things Soviet, while referring readers (really quite a bit too coyly) to his earlier books—notably his classic Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1976). This frequently palls, but Voinovich offers a beguiling host of vividly imagined supporting characters, including Aglaya’s nemesis Shubkin, a labor camp survivor and novelist (and Solzhenitsyn caricature) whose inflammatory novella The Timber Camp makes him both famous and notorious; wily political survivor Admiral Makarov; idealistic war hero (and Aglaya’s aging admirer) General Burdalakov; and, in the climactic subplot that shapes the explosive climax, wounded Afghan War veteran and dedicated terrorist Vanka Zhukov. Monumental Propaganda meanders, but is solidified by its ferocious comic concentration on Aglaya’s zealous love for the good old days of benevolent despotism (when advised her homeland has embraced democracy, she incredulously cries,” And you say they don’t put anyone in jail?”), capped by her final feverish “embrace” of her beloved leader.
Not Voinovich’s very best, but a welcome addition to a brilliantly subversive and hugely entertaining body of work.Pub Date: July 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41235-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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