A grainy montage of suffering and survival, by turns morbid and mordant.
Now in English translation, the 1991 novel by bestselling Chinese author Yu Hua (To Live, 2003).
Yu’s first full-length work—actually, a serpentine, episodic collection of anecdotes forming a kind of Maoist-era kinderscenen—details the boyhood of Sun Guanglin and his encounters with some dreadfully unfortunate (or just plain dreadful) people in two Chinese rural villages—the discordantly Midwestern-sounding “Southgate” and “Littlemarsh.” Guanglin’s father, Kwangtsai, beats him, tries unsuccessfully to capitalize on youngest son Guangming’s death by drowning and molests both women in elder son Guangping’s life. Kwangtsai cavorts with the nymphomaniac widow next door, giving her his wife’s household goods, then starves his own father and ultimately drinks himself to death. Guanglin’s Littlemarsh adoptive parents, to whom he’s farmed out at age six, turn him into a household servant and entrust his education to sadistic teachers. The foster father dies spectacularly (suicide by grenade) after blowing up the apartment of the woman who exposed his extra-marital affair. Alone once more, Guanglin, now 12, borrows the fare from another unwanted child, his friend Guoqing, and returns home to where the story began: Kwangtsai’s cottage is engulfed in flames. Flashbacks reveal that Guanglin’s grandfather, Sun Youyuan, fled the Japanese invasion and rescued a former aristocrat and fellow refugee, Guanglin’s grandmother, who was turned out of her mandarin home because she happened to glimpse two sparrows mating. Youyuan saves the rice harvest by urging Southgate residents to toss out their Buddha figurines, but then dies, convinced his soul has already departed. Guanglin’s friends are equally doomed: Schoolmate Su Yu, after doing time in reform school for embracing a girl, dies of a brain hemorrhage while his family follow their morning routine, assuming Yu is sleeping late. Guoqing, whose father abruptly remarried, leaving the nine-year-old with a spooky old lady, prospers from subsidies from other relatives but at 13 is arrested for attacking a family who won’t let him court their daughter.
A grainy montage of suffering and survival, by turns morbid and mordant.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-27999-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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