The idea behind Ozick's short allegory is electric, arcing across the spaces between literature and salvation—but at such curt length, and so jammed, that the execution is staticky. Lars Andemening is the third-string book reviewer (the one who does "serious" books by European writers no one has much heard of) on an itself less-than-leading Stockholm daily. Divorced twice, Lars doesn't especially care about his lack of status, though; in private he has something more nourishing, i.e., the absolute conviction that he is the son of the Jewish Polish genius Bruno Schulz, tragically killed in the streets of his small Polish town by the S.S. So intent is he on seeing through his putative father's eyes that Lars has arranged to learn Polish so he can savor in the original the two extant short collections Schulz left. . .and dream in fidelity at least about the "lost" last work, The Messiah. Then one day Lars gets a message—from an old woman, a bookseller who's been his chief confidante concerning his self-assumed identity—that his sister is in Stockholm. He hates to believe that a sister even exists; and worse, when he meets the woman, she has brought along a manuscript stored in an amphora, claiming (as does the bookseller's husband, a Dr. Eklund, a shadowy expert in provenances) that it is The Messiah! Lars ultimately and violently does far worse than reject the woman and the manuscript. . .which is at about the point when a chill runs down a reader's spine: the title of the lost Schulz book in this context is no accident—and how will the imagination, when the time comes, react to real redemption? The most Jamesian of Ozick's very Master-imbued works, the novella's conceptual frame is clean, polished, and startling. Yet the actual prose is frantically busy; the dialogue is hyperbolic, tuned to an impossibly high, brassy pitch; and the allegory doesn't get enough space to insinuate, to slink in—it comes at you like a cuffing instead. Great fables, Schulz's themselves a prime example, at first wear a fake coat of innocence—yet Ozick seems not to have the patience for that: wanting the allegory to be morally indelible, it bursts toward us flood-like, and the result is smear. Challenging but twitchy work by one of our most remarkable stylists.
Pub Date: March 10, 1987
ISBN: 0394756940
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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