A fanciful, suggestible, strafingly comic view of man and all his manifestations at a future point in time when "Death is winning. Life is losing." And in terms of most readers, a more palpable and accessible book than The Moviegoer or The Last Gentleman. What will be happening — what won't — in an America divided is seen from Mr. Percy's native Louisiana and more particularly a Howard Johnson's at the "southwest cusp of the interstate cloverleaf." On the one hand you have the liberals and Knotheads (the old Republican Party although very little is coming out of the "Tel-a-Viv Hilton on Pennsylvania Avenue") and on the other the divers miscreants who live in the swampy outback — black guerrillas, drugheads, Ku Kluxers, dropouts, communists, etc. All have dreadful physical complaints, suppurating from the soul and running in particular to and from the bowels — "the real enemy is within, don't you think?" Tom More, our Bad Catholic, also a genius and a widower and a cuckold and a psychiatrist has, like his colleagues, "a few problems of (his) own, little rancors and terrors and such." He is holed up at the Howard Johnson's with three women who love him too much, two more than he can handle. In fact Tom has been institutionalized; he also has invented a Lapsometer which can diagnose and treat the "perturbations" of the soul and he is seeking official funding for it before the melee which takes place on a not so glorious Fourth of July. At the close, Tom is seen cultivating his garden of collards in a slave quarters but like his famous ancestor he has learned that "All any man needs is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty. As Kingfish Huey Long used to say: every man a king." As will have been apparent, it is impossible to indicate the range of Walker Percy's septic but indulgently appealing satire with its fallout of ideas and phenomena and magnificently funny moments. It is to be read — and best read more than once.
Pub Date: May 17, 1971
ISBN: 0312243111
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
