Lyrical, accessible, enchanting: Yoshimoto deserves her international popularity.
Two teenaged cousins spend a final summer in their seaside hometown, in the gentle, reflective latest from Yoshimoto (Asleep, 2000, etc.).
Because Maria’s father was unable to get a divorce, she and her mother lived throughout her childhood at the Yamamoto Inn, run by Maria’s aunt and uncle, seeing Dad only on weekends. This wasn’t easy, especially since life there was dominated by Maria’s sharp-tongued cousin Tsugumi, seriously ill since birth and determined to take it out on everyone around her. But the cousins have been close ever since Tsugumi faked a ghostly letter from Maria’s beloved and recently deceased grandfather—a peculiar incident that sets the tone for their relationship: Tsugumi is outrageous (by Japanese standards, anyway; Americans may find her merely crotchety); Maria values her blunt honesty and understands the pain that fuels her anger. Looking back as an adult, Maria mingles memories of their childhood with an account of their last summer together, just after Maria’s parents finally married and the family moved to Tokyo, and just before the Yamamotos sold the inn to start a European-style pension in the mountains. Yoshimoto’s trademark blend of slangy prose and traditional Japanese affinity for nature is here again, though typical of her fresh outlook is a lovely scene when the girls walk over a mountain at night to dispel their sorrow over the final broadcast of a favorite TV show. Tsugumi’s gruff charm and deep loneliness are well drawn, as is the quiet empathy of the young man she falls in love with. But the standout here is Maria: determinedly optimistic like her mother, yet affectionate toward by her father’s nervous, loving anxieties, she grows into a happy maturity with the knowledge that loss is an inevitable part of growing up. The slightly odd ending, which casually thwarts expectations of a tragic denouement for Tsugumi, reminds us that this author never settles for the expected.
Lyrical, accessible, enchanting: Yoshimoto deserves her international popularity.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1638-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
