Weil’s stories are engrossing, persuasively detailed, and written with a deep affection for the way language can, in...
A rich, often dazzling collection of short stories linked by themes while ranging widely in style from Babel-like fables to gritty noir and sci-fi.
Weil (The Great Glass Sea, 2014, etc.) says he wrote these eight stories over the course of a decade, yet they show a sustained preoccupation with light: as image, object of desire, and source of wonder, among other things. In the opening tale, “No Flies, No Folly,” a Jewish peddler in 1901 Pennsylvania Dutch country woos a farming woman with an Edison bulb in a scene of splendidly odd seduction. The peddler will return in the final tale, in which his younger self, a deserter from the Russian army, encounters a photographer who “spoke of bromides, emulsion,” but was talking “always, about only one thing: light.” Weil’s other theme is scientific progress, and the two motifs often intersect. “Long Bright Line” follows a girl’s fascination with flight and airplanes. The coming of electricity is featured in a brooding tale in which a remote town has waited decades for the miracle and then, in 1940, battles the power company that has bypassed it as being unprofitable. “Angle of Reflection” tells of youths in the early 1990s pondering life’s dangers, mean parents, and the Soviets’ "space mirror," a science-fiction–ish technology that aimed to boost productivity by lengthening the hours of daylight. While the gadget failed in real life, Weil imagines it into a not-distant future and the problems of life without real darkness, as he did extensively in The Great Glass Sea. One of three stories that refer to these mirrors is the appropriately noir “The First Bad Thing.” A woman of 20 and an older man find a physical connection, “like mountain cats tied tail to tail,” and then flee murky pasts, traveling north to Canada in the “long dusk” the mirrors have left in search of true night.
Weil’s stories are engrossing, persuasively detailed, and written with a deep affection for the way language can, in masterful hands, convey us to marvelous new worlds.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2701-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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