Returning to the inner-city losers and loners of The Rainbow Stories (1989), Vollman takes another very graphic look at the seamy side of San Francisco. In short, self-contained chapters, Vollman tells the story of Jimmy the Vietnam vet, down-and-out and surviving on his disability check in a series of flophouses. Jimmy is searching for Gloria, the whore he loves, but Gloria remains elusive—indeed, she may not exist—so Jimmy, an alcoholic and general all-around troubled soul, decides to re-create Gloria himself. Each night he goes out and finds a local whore who can give him something ``to help Gloria along with a splash of light on the ocean and everything moving and rocking and shining in the sun so God help me now because Gloria is the great sea those whore-fish swim in.'' One, Nicole, may have deliberately given Jimmy AIDS; another, Melissa, gives him her childhood memories; and Dinah, whose pimp spends her money on dope, gives him a lock of hair. As Jimmy continues his search, he meets up with old friends like Phyllis the transvestite, and Code Six, a fellow vet, while, in the Tenderloin district, girls like Candy and Peggy tell him their life stories. But Jimmy, like all losers, is doomed. Gloria, according to Code Six, materializes and ``drills'' Jimmy ``right on Turk Street. That's where he got lit up.'' The terrain's been surveyed before, and Vollman's fierce writing seems often more designed to shock than to elucidate, but poor Jimmy does have some credibility, even if it at times strained. Not for the fainthearted.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40342-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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