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GOD'S GRACE

Name: GOD'S GRACE
Author: Bernard Malamud
ISBN: 0374529671

by Bernard Malamud ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 1982

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The nuclear holocaust has come and gone. Only one man survives: paleologist Calvin Cohn, who happened to be safely, deeply underwater at the time. And, after some black-humor-ish conversations with God, Cohn is allowed to live—for a while, at least—and he finds himself on an island a la Robinson Crusoe, with a communicative chimp named Buz (product of chimp-speech experiments) as his only companion. Cohn, son of a rabbi, engages in existential, religious, and Talmudic speculations with the chimp—though he refrains from trying to convert him to Judaism. He must reexamine the basics of social interaction—when Buz gets too physically chummy ("If you had suckled the lad, could you marry him?"), when a friendly gorilla appears and causes jealousies, and, above all, when five more talking chimps appear. . . including the lisping Mary Madelyn, the object of everyone's sexual attention (including Cohn's). Can a decent civilization be made from these creatures? Cohn believes that "if this small community behaved, developed, endured, it might someday—if some chimpy Father Abraham got himself born—produce its own Covenant with God." But such visions of a peaceful society are doomed, of course: envy, hatred, and violence inevitably ensue—and Cohn's mating with Mary Madelyn ("I have kept my virginity for you ever since you expwained the word to me when you first read me Rome and Juwiet") will eventually lead to murder and revolution. Despite Malamud's shadings with rabbinical law, then, this is a familiar hopeless-Utopia blueprint. Moreover, the restless treatment here—part downbeat-comic, part liturgical-lyric—never endows the tale with the sort of Biblical fervor which heightens the best of Doris Lessing's fables. And the result is a disappointing, predictable parable—intentionally funny at times but unintentionally funny too, hollow in most of its lyrical moments, and only occasionally provocative in its eclectic philosophizing.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1982

ISBN: 0374529671

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE COMPLETE STORIES
by Bernard Malamud

- BOOK REVIEW
TALKING HORSE
by Bernard Malamud

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD
by Bernard Malamud

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

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.