An impressively quiet book that addresses important themes with intelligence and empathy.
East African novelist Gurnah (Paradise, 1994, etc.) luminously weaves together themes of alienation, treachery, and despair, in a story about two political exiles, in a drab English seaside town, whoat last find forgiveness and understanding.
When aging Saleh Omar, a Zanzibar native, arrives in England seeking asylum, he claims not to speak English. He also calls himself Rajab Shaaban, a name he has borrowed for reasons that soon become clear. As Omar settles into a small apartment provided by immigration authorities, he spends his days checking out the local furniture stores and recalling the past. He recalls the prosperous furniture shop he ran, the loan he secured for Hussein, a seafaring merchant from Bahrain, that would cause him and the story's other protagonist so much trouble. Meanwhile, poet and professor Latif Mahmud, also from Zanzibar, having been alerted by the authorities that a fellow Zanzibari might need help with translation, looks back at his own past. As order broke down in Zanzibar after it gained independence from Britain, Latif accepted a scholarship to study in the former East Germany, escaping soon after to Britain. He still holds Omar responsible for his family’s decline: his mother took lovers, his father became an alcoholic, and their house was repossessed. When the two men finally remeet, the embittered Latif accuses Omar not only of stealing his father’s name, Rajab Shabaan, but his property. Omar then relates how he honorably inherited the Shabaan property only to lose it; how, in the political turmoil, he was imprisoned on false charges by Latif’s family; how he belatedly learned of the death of his wife and only child; and how he managed to escape further persecution by fleeing under an assumed name. With these confessions, both men find a satisfying cloture with hints of fuller lives to come.
An impressively quiet book that addresses important themes with intelligence and empathy.Pub Date: June 11, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-658-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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