This third and final volume of a trilogy (preceded by The Hamlet in 1940 and The Town in 1957) traces the pattern created by the lives of the indomitable Snopes clan from 1908 through the aftermath of World War II. Faulkner divides this work into three sections, each of which is named for a member of the Snopes family: "Mink", the petulant bitter, and child-like farmer who kills Jack Houston and spends his 38 years in Parchman Penitentiary planning the murder of his cousin Flem who failed to come to his aid at the murder trial; "Linda", the daughter of Eula Varner (Flem's wife) who marries a Greenwich Village sculptor and goes with him to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he is killed, and she becomes deaf and returns to Mississippi; and finally "Flem", the Snopes for whom even the life of a wife and daughter are not too much to sacrifice in his selfish, fierce, and ignorant struggle for money and material control. Mr. Faulkner has been writing about the Snopes family for 34 years, and there is not a particle of their characters or their little world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, that he does not know intimately. Those readers who are acquainted with the Snopes family and the author's highly distinctive stylistic mastery will not be disappointed in this book and will, I think,agree that "Linda" (the middle section) is one of Faulkner's most sensitive and intensely dramatic creations.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1959
ISBN: 0394702824
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1959
BOOK REVIEW
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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