Somehow, it makes sense that when Walter Mosley puts forth a novel of ideas, it arrives with the unexpected force of a left...
The versatile, justly celebrated creator of Easy Rawlins, Leonid McGill, and other iconic crime solvers raises the stakes with this tightly wound combination of psychological suspense and philosophic inquiry.
Every now and then, Mosley (Down the River Unto the Sea, 2018, etc.) likes to pitch a change-up to his detective novel devotees with forays into racy melodrama (Debbie Doesn’t Do It Any More, 2014) and science fiction (Inside a Silver Box, 2015). Here he weaves elements of both the erotic and the speculative into a taut, riveting, and artfully edgy saga of a charismatic and controversial history professor at a mythical southwestern university. If his name, which is the same as the novel’s, sounds like an alias, it is an alias: In a previous life, John Woman’s name was Cornelius Jones, a shy teenage bookworm filling in for his invalid father, Herman, a projectionist in a silent-movie repertory theater in Manhattan’s East Village. Cornelius, or CC, finds his unassuming life disrupted when the theater’s owner barges into the projection booth threatening to fire his dad. CC kills the owner and hides his corpse in a trunk that he stows in a built-in bookcase concealed from view. After his father dies, Cornelius changes his identity, attends both City College and Harvard, and eventually heads for the New University of the Southwest, where, as professor Woman, he achieves a reputation as a demanding instructor of “deconstructionist historical devices,” intended to challenge students to think outside conventional definitions of recorded time. Woman’s provocative approach to his subject bewilders most of his students (at first) while ticking off fellow faculty members enough to look for any reason to dismiss him. In the meantime, Woman makes things hotter for himself with an affair with a student and is chilled by the enigmatic shadows stalking him, whether it’s a mysterious billionaire auditing his class or anonymous notes he finds on his kitchen table alluding to his deadly past.
Somehow, it makes sense that when Walter Mosley puts forth a novel of ideas, it arrives with the unexpected force of a left hook and the metallic gleam of a new firearm.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2841-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
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