A boozy, grungy, alt-rock fable that might as well have a soundtrack by The Replacements.
A dejected bartender pursues his recently returned ex through the dive bars of New York City.
This messy little novella is the latest creative collaboration between writer Lipez, designer Wakefield, and photographer and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Zinner (Please Take Me off the Guest List, 2010). The story itself is little more than a nihilistic chronicle of confused young love in the subterranean lairs of New York City. That said, the narrator’s painfully honest voice, Zinner’s evocative photographs, and the rich graphic design lend the package a funky mood that recalls Douglas Coupland’s early works. Lipez’s ongoing day job as a bartender also helps relay a stylish authenticity to what is essentially one long bar crawl. Our narrator is Sam, aforementioned bartender, who’s in a bit of a rut after having been dumped by Vicki, “my one true love, ender of marriages and my heart.” After leaving Sam, Vicki has been going to AA meetings to get her life together. But when Sam gets wind that she’s drinking again, he recruits his horndog best friend, Francis, for a careening drug- and alcohol-fueled quest to win back her heart. Along with occasional cameos from Sam’s acerbic ex-wife, Aviva, the duo encounters all manner of miscreants, iconoclasts, and other aberrations, all punctuated by miniexhibits by Zinner with titles like “Eleven Moments on the Way to Somewhere Else” and “Seven Moments of Clarity.” Don’t bother looking for the absent moral of the story; just enjoy Lipez’s spare prose and dry wit, framed by Zinner’s sly photography. “Everybody I’d ever cared for was truly taking it to the hoop tonight,” Sam says near the end. “Was it a full moon? I ran my hand through my hair and it came back wet. Beer and vodka and snow.”
A boozy, grungy, alt-rock fable that might as well have a soundtrack by The Replacements.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-667-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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