Very clever indeed: Kurt Vonnegut laced with Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Bereft and deranged earthlings struggle to adapt to a world without divine guidance in this mordant dystopian fable, its Maine author’s abrasively funny first novel.
It begins in Darfur, whence God, hamstrung by the indecisiveness of “an implacable polytheistic bureaucracy,” has come, in the guise of a native African (Dinka) woman, to show His solidarity with embattled Sudanese refugees. The Deity’s disguised appearance elicits both emergency aid and profane insubordination from visiting U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when the eponymous tragedy occurs, humanity comes apart at its seams in a series of variously interrelated seriocomic episodes. A hopeful high-school graduate eager to jettison her past and embrace the future instead experiences numbing depression when she observes a priest committing suicide. When the absence of God moves parents to blind adoration of their children, a weary CAPP (Child Adulation Prevention Psychologist) tries, and fails, to set misguided moms and dads straight. Directionless teens form a suicide club, and a love-struck adolescent joins the Marines to fight in a catastrophic global war that pits Postmodern Anthropologists against Evolutionary Psychologists. When an unstable young man who cannot completely shed his Christian faith commits mass murder, his innocent family are “accused” of worship. Clearly, Currie intends these spiky narratives to fray readers’ nerves, and despite a tendency to push even his most inspired premises to what’s-going-on-here extremes, they’re almost uniformly inventive and absorbing. His wired imagination works best in a monologue-“interview” with the last surviving member of the feral dog pack that feasted on the Deity’s fresh corpse, ingested some of His powers and were themselves worshipped by humans, before suffering exploitation by a megalomaniac theologian. Currie builds momentum expertly, but diffuses it somewhat with an ending that almost exactly echoes that of the popular film The Terminator.
Very clever indeed: Kurt Vonnegut laced with Louis-Ferdinand Céline.Pub Date: July 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-03867-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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