A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and...
The debut novel from Australian actor Arnold is a fusion of paranormal fantasy and mystery set in a world where magic has been effectively destroyed by humans, forcing the supernatural population to live a radically diminished existence.
Fetch Phillips is a “Man for Hire,” which is another way of saying the down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking former Soldier–turned-detective will do just about anything to pay the bills. When a principal from a cross-species school enlists him to find a missing professor—a 300-year-old Vampire named Edmund Rye—Phillips quickly agrees. Without magic, the Vampires—and all other supernatural beings—are slowly dying. So how difficult could it be to find a withered bloodsucker who is so weak he can hardly move around? After visiting Rye’s last residence—a secluded loft space in the local library filled with the Vampire’s research and writings—Phillips discovers that one of Rye’s students is missing as well: a young Siren named January. His investigation becomes complicated when more Vampires turn up dead and he is almost killed himself. While the mystery element of the storyline is a bit thin, the focus on meticulous worldbuilding and highly detailed backstory as well as the cast of fully developed and memorable characters (Simms, the reptilian cop; Peteris, the disfigured half-werewolf; etc.) are unarguable strengths. But the real power here is in Arnold’s use of imagery throughout. His unconventional descriptive style brings a richness and depth to the narrative. Pete’s smile is “like a handbag with a broken zipper,” and the sound of Phillips’ falling from a building is “like someone stepping on an egg full of snails.”
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and Dashiell Hammett.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45582-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.
A modern Don Quixote lands in Trumpian America and finds plenty of windmills to tilt at.
Mix Rushdie’s last novel, The Golden House (2017), with his 1990 fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and you get something approaching this delightful confection. An aging salesman loses his job as a pharmaceutical rep, fired, with regret, by his cousin and employer. The old man, who bears the name Ismail Smile, Smile itself being an Americanization of Ismail, is “a brown man in America longing for a brown woman.” He is a dreamer—and not without ambition. Borrowing from both opera and dim memories of Cervantes, he decides to call himself Quichotte, though fake news, the din of television, and “the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and not dusty medieval romances have made him a little dotty. His Dulcinea, Salma R, exists on the other side of the TV screen, so off Quichotte quests in a well-worn Chevy, having acquired as if by magic a patient son named Sancho, who observes that Dad does everything just like it’s done on the tube and in stories: “So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, ‘Daddy,’ is my Ahab." By this point, Rushdie has complicated the yarn by attributing it to a hack writer, another Indian immigrant, named Sam DuChamp (read Sam the Sham), who has mixed into the Quixote story lashings of Moby-Dick, Ismail for Ishmael, and the Pinocchio of both Collodi and Disney (“You can call me Jiminy if you want,” says an Italian-speaking cricket to Sancho along the way), to say nothing of the America of Fentanyl, hypercapitalism, and pop culture and the yearning for fame. It’s a splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization: “What vanishes when everything vanishes," Rushdie writes, achingly, “not only everything, but the memory of everything.”
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13298-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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