Not for the faint of mind, but a forceful testament to the uphill struggle of pioneer programmers.
A blistering drama about love, hate, and psychopathy.
Ullman, one of the first women in cyberspace, guided readers to the innermost circle of computerdom in the 1997 memoir Close to the Machine. Her first fiction—which descends back into this realm of basement cafés and windowless break rooms, of buzzing fluorescents, whining computers, and cussing hackers—sustains a haunting tone of revulsion mingled with nostalgia. This artful tension distinguishes heroine Roberta Walton, who tells about the dramatic undoing in 1984 of Ethan Levin, a slightly odious but efficient programmer plagued by a highly odious but efficient computer bug. Roberta is the failed academic who, between cigarette breaks, tests Ethan’s programs. Her discovery of the bug, dubbed “Jester” by cutthroat colleagues, stirs Ethan to humiliate Roberta during a Telligentsia staff meeting. (Ironically, the event will trigger Roberta’s rise from lowly tester to wealthy consultant.) Harassed and embarrassed, Ethan escapes at night into a simulated world he programmed. But Jester keeps freezing Telligentsia’s system during presentations to investors, and Ethan, slipping into deepest paranoia, links its origin to his girlfriend’s taking of a lover. He confronts neighbors about loud music, complains about odd environmental stimuli at work, and soon he’s wearing a purple headband over earplugs and lowering a blue parachute over his desk. Desperate, he turns to Roberta, and the two forge an unlikely closeness. But Ethan is beyond hope. Ullman, who relies on dramatic irony to advance her plot, overplays it during the crawling conclusion, and her misguided generosity extends also to arcane descriptions, with a penchant for technobabble—akin to Updike’s similarly flawed Roger’s Version—that detracts from an otherwise fine novel: a story that, at its best, finds in computers the same eerie allure that DeLillo’s White Noise found in televisions.
Not for the faint of mind, but a forceful testament to the uphill struggle of pioneer programmers.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50860-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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