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THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES

Overly broad but brilliant.

Yan (The Four Books, 2015, etc.) returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and “contemporary China’s incomprehensible absurdity.”

Yan puts what he calls “mythorealism”—a blend of fabulation, wishful thinking, and willful suspension of reality—to work in his yarn of a village flanking the Balou Mountains, a geographical entity familiar to readers of his Lenin’s Kisses(2012). Nothing much happens in Explosion, a hamlet founded by a hundred-odd refugees from a long-ago volcano. Most of those people, Yan tells us, were named Kong or Zhu, and most “claimed to be descendants of Confucius, though there are no genealogical records to corroborate this claim.” Alas, the newest generation of Explosionites lacks the conservative Confucian impulse to leave well enough alone, and soon a hutful of Kong brothers (“Our family will produce an emperor,” says their mother, “but I don’t know which of our four sons it will be”) is vying to consolidate power against the resistance, intentional or not, of their fellow villagers. Says one would-be king Kong to his more effectively ambitious sibling, “My brother, your entire life you have been foiled by women.” True enough. Yan’s yarn might have been more fun if it had tacked into Lysistrataterritory, but as it is it has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness. Indeed, his satire is careful and crafty: we all know that when Kong Mingyao says to Kong Mingliang, “Brother, we are truly corrupt,” he is speaking of every Chinese official who would sacrifice the public good for private gain. As it is, the premise is so sweeping—a cabal of Explosionites decides to take their city from whistle-stop to mega-metropolis in a generation, going from hundreds to tens of millions, and all sorts of mayhem ensues—that it can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire, which probably won’t do much to keep Yan out of trouble with the censors in Beijing.

Overly broad but brilliant.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2582-8

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

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THINGS FALL APART

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

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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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