Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness.
Early 20th-century New York and its denizens portrayed through the fictional diary of a nonfictional heroine.
Mazie Phillips was a real person, a rough-and-ready Mother Theresa who walked the streets of Lower Manhattan in the early 1930s, giving out money for food, buying drinks, calling ambulances. She was profiled by New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell in an essay collected in Up in the Old Hotel (1992), which is how Attenberg (The Middlesteins, 2013, etc.) came to know of her. Attenberg's fictional Mazie begins a diary she will keep for 32 years on Nov. 1, 1907, with this entry: "Today is my birthday. I am ten. You are my present." Born in Boston, Mazie now lives in New York with her older sister Rosie, who has rescued her and another sister from their parents, "a rat" and "a simp." Rosie's husband, Louis Gordon, owns a cinema, and at 21, Mazie begins her long career as ticket-seller. A free-thinking, hard-drinking gal who never marries or has children, Mazie carries on an intermittent, lifelong affair with a sea captain. Their first tryst, on the Brooklyn Bridge, is described in the diary with characteristic blunt eloquence. "We pecked at each other for a minute, figuring each other out. Finally he kissed my upper lip, and then my lower lip....He put his tongue where he liked. I could not argue. I did not even try." Mazie's voice is the most successful thing in this book. Perhaps we didn't need Nadine, the fictional documentarian who puts her story together, adding excerpts of interviews with the sea captain's son, Mazie's now-ancient neighbor, and the great-granddaughter of the theater manager. A particularly odd subplot has the man who supposedly found the diary making a play for Nadine.
Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9989-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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