While colonials and nationalists go on fiddling and proselytizing, V. S. Naipaul illuminates lite millennium which is here. He brings an uncompromising intelligence to a unique perspective on the world at large, as it is seen by the multiracial, multicultural children of Empire who as a consequence of their mixed heritage, are political orphans in perpetual exile. Guerrillas, half dream and half news story, outlines the ugly cracks in the ideological jigsaw of a Caribbean island just next door to Naipaul's native Trinidad—a state where "everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla." The novel's central encounter parodies our collective racist sexual fantasy as seen in exploitation films like Mandingo (a chief form of entertainment in this outpost of Naipaulia) by deliberately hybridizing it with the romance of Wuthering Heights. Thrushcross Grange is the name that Chinese half-breed leader Jimmy Armed has given to his back-to-the-land revolutionary commune where in fact young boys are reamed rather than reformed; the latest object of his perverse, ultimately bloody affections is the spoiled mistress of his chief supporter among the establishment, a man deported from South Africa for his activism. Jimmy finds his justification in Cathy's portrait of Heathcliff: "Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China, we knew it all along"; for he more than anyone longs for the days of privilege and splendor. When the brawling, hungry slum that comprises this tiny republic explodes in flames bringing a swarm of U.S. helicopters, pettiness and power-lust also erupt down the length of the island as slaves and masters change partners. No easy answers for Naipaul: just "hints of the failure and shoddiness to come" in a social novel that will define for generations to come the terms of the devolution of Mistah Kurz's property.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0679731741
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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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