MOSHI MOSHI

Name: MOSHI MOSHI
Author: Banana Yohimoto
ISBN: 978-1-61902-786-2

by Banana Yohimoto translated by Asa Yoneda ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 13, 2016

A fleeting portrait of a critical moment in a young woman’s life, one with which the late John Hughes might have felt some...

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A young Japanese woman is left hurt, confused, and lost in the wake of her father’s mysterious death.

Prolific novelist Yoshimoto (The Lake, 2011, etc.) offers another story of youth, grief, and redemption in this ephemeral yet lovely portrait of an unformed woman. The narrator here is Yocchan, who's fled her childhood home for the hip urban district of Shimokitazawa in central Tokyo to seek work and independence. A year ago, her musician father, Imo, was found dead in a murder-suicide with a mysterious woman in a forest. The story, like many of Yoshimoto’s arcs, is one in which there’s little real drama, yet a pressing emotional alchemy emerges that leaves everyone changed at the end. Yocchan struggles but doesn't give up, pressing ahead with her new job at a French bistro and flirting with a handsome admirer, Shintani-kun. Her mother, haunted by her husband’s ghost, moves in with her daughter in her small apartment and struggles to remake her own life. “We each had to live our own battles,” Yocchan confesses. “We could hardly give up and die; and if we had to live, we’d have to rely on what we were made of.” Along the way, there are delicate and vivid descriptions of food, work, loneliness, and human connection, too, painted with subtle yet heartfelt language. Yocchan enters a relationship with Shintani-kun yet finds herself drawn to Yamazaki-san, an older man who was a band mate of her father's. The book culminates in a ceremony to free her father’s spirit and a tipping point that leaves Yocchan on the verge of leaving for Paris and, as all young people do, standing on the precipice of becoming her adult self.

A fleeting portrait of a critical moment in a young woman’s life, one with which the late John Hughes might have felt some kinship.

Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-61902-786-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016

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LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

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THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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.