A pleasing tale of reconciliation laced with acid humor and a cheery avoidance of sentimentality.
Neighborliness isn’t an option for two elderly enemies living in adjacent homes in Katterijn, an upscale South African residential community. So what will happen when events push them into grudging cohabitation?
They call each other Hortensia the Horrible and Marion the Vulture, and they've lived next door to each other for 20 unfriendly years, with black Hortensia James openly despising white Marion Agostino’s racism. Marion, mother of four and a widow, is 81; childless, Barbadian Hortensia, whose husband is on his deathbed, is four years older. Both struggled successfully to express their outstanding creativity in the mid-20th century, when working women with their own businesses were rare. Hortensia overcame racism and parental disapproval to found a famed fabric-design company, while Marion built a successful architectural practice until her pregnancies forced her to quit. In her U.S. debut, South Africa–based Barbadian writer Omotoso does a deft job of shading in the personal and professional back stories to this pair of life-hardened battle-axes, adding a deeper layer of historical resonance in the form of a surprise claim for restitution by descendants of slaves quartered at Katterijn. Children, marriage, money, race, forgiveness, and ownership all play a part as the two old sparring partners find it useful—after an accident which leaves Hortensia bed-bound and Marion homeless—to share a house, coming to terms in the process with their own and each other’s truths. Hortensia will have none of Marion’s “Thelma-and-Louise bullshit” as they open up to each other and compassion emerges (mixed with impatience in Hortensia’s case and shame in Marion’s) for babies born and not born, opportunities lost, and the suffering of generations past.
A pleasing tale of reconciliation laced with acid humor and a cheery avoidance of sentimentality.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12457-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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