A fine tribute to a writer defined by his singular command of mood and mystery.
A career-spanning story collection from Tabucchi (1943-2012; For Isabel: A Mandala, 2017, etc.) exploring the liminal spaces between dream and waking, fact and fiction.
All but one of the 22 stories here have appeared in earlier books, and taken together they make for a substantive overview of the obsessions that marked Tabucchi's work. “The Reversal Game” and “Night, Sea, or Distance,” both set in Portugal, evoke his admiration for Fernando Pessoa, particularly his interest in the slippery melancholy state of "saudade." “Clouds” and “The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico” are elliptical evocations of the subconscious; in the latter story, a monk’s vision of a trio of insectlike beings can be read as magical realism or a hallucination of a cloistered mind. “Cinema” is a noir satire about two movie actors who attempt to turn their roles as World War II resistance fighters into reality. “The phrase that follows this is false…” and “Little Gatsby” are arch metafictions that weave the author himself into the story. At once modern (fragmentary, interior rhetoric) and postmodern (satirical, suspect of narrative), Tabucchi possessed a lively and inimitable sensibility; “imagination gave him a reality so alive that it seemed more real than the reality he was living,” he writes of one character, a notion that guides many of these stories. Not all of these high-concept stories succeed; some are overly digressive, and Tabucchi has a habit of introducing a stray memory or reverie in a story the way a hack crime writer introduces a thug with a gun. But in magical stories like “Clouds” and “Letter from Casablanca,” he creates somber vignettes that are playful in structure and imagination. The latter is narrated by a man who discovers his capacity to impersonate a woman singer, a fulfillment of Tabucchi’s feeling that we can inhabit any environment, however foreign, if we pay close enough attention.
A fine tribute to a writer defined by his singular command of mood and mystery.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1939810-15-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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