As engrossing as Lodge’s skillful structuring and bawdy badinage is, this time out he promises more than he ultimately...
Literature and science battle for supremacy in this three-pronged academic satire from Lodge (Home Truths, 2000, etc.) that gets in many a good jab before running out of steam.
Ralph Messenger is king of the roost at the fictitious University of Gloucester—an artificial-feeling, remote grouping of modern buildings and insecure faculty clustered around a man-made lake—where he directs the Center for Cognitive Science. Lodge tells his story from three alternating directions: the first is through Messenger, dictating stream-of-consciousness diary entries and musings into a tape recorder; the second is comprised of selections from the journal of Helen Reed, a recently widowed, popular midlist novelist who’s come to teach a writing seminar; and the third is through omniscient narrator. From these triangulated points of view, we follow Messenger’s wandering, carnal eye as he reminisces about his sexual conquests (unbeknownst, he believes, to his wife), recalls his numerous media appearances, and focuses in on the vulnerable-seeming Reed. Coming as they do straight from the horse’s mouth, Messenger’s recordings are the most nakedly revealing parts.But while their style is considerably more restrained, Reed’s entries ultimately prove to be the more interesting. The embarrassment she feels at her growing attraction to the arrogant, priapic Messenger (compounded by her fast friendship with his wife) is exactingly detailed and more resonant in the end than Messenger’s satirical antics. Lodge’s fractured approach works both for and against him by allowing the reader the obvious advantage of observing a tumultuous, secretive relationship from multiple angles—but it also sets the stage for a deeper story that never quite materializes. Lodge gets good mileage out of a series of writing exercises Reed assigns to her students where they write in the style of a well-known British author; they’re mostly beside the point, but Lodge’s carbon-copy imitations of people like Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis are priceless nonetheless.
As engrossing as Lodge’s skillful structuring and bawdy badinage is, this time out he promises more than he ultimately delivers.Pub Date: June 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89984-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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
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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