A best-seller in its original language, this dastardly little novel focuses on love, desire and what we stand to lose when...
Money can’t buy happiness for an introspective housewife who wins the lottery.
This is the first novel to appear in English by French author Delacourt, who was recently in the news after being sued by actress Scarlett Johansson for using her image in another novel. The Wish List details the inner life of Jocelyne, a 47-year-old wife in a small French town. Her family includes a stillborn baby, two grown children, and her husband, curiously named Jocelyn, a middle manager at a Häagen-Daz factory who drinks too much beer and dreams of luxuries like a flat-screen television. Jocelyne also has her own career, running a fabric shop and composing a very successful blog about sewing and knitting. She claims happiness, with her simple descriptions of everyday pleasures, only exposing her fears to her stroke-addled father. Everything comes tumbling down when, at the urging of two younger friends, Jocelyne buys a lottery ticket and wins over €18 million, a fact that she keeps secret from everyone, hiding the check in a wardrobe. “It’s only in books that you can change your life,” she advises. “Wipe out everything at a stroke. Do away with the weight of things. Delete the nasty parts, and then at the end of a sentence find yourself on the far side of the world.” At the heart of Jocelyne’s anxiety over her new fortune is a kind of quiet hysteria, steeped in the fear that if she gives her husband the objects that he covets, he will no longer want her. As Jocelyne's secret is finally uncovered, this domestic novel reveals itself as one the late novelist Josephine Hart might have written.
A best-seller in its original language, this dastardly little novel focuses on love, desire and what we stand to lose when we win.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312465-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
© 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.
