This story is sad and sometimes overly sentimental, but Jansma’s narrative shines when he moves away from the collective...
From the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (2013), a deeply emotional ode to friendship—to the people who make you feel alive and who you follow without question and to the bonds that endure, even if only in memory.
“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires.” Jansma’s novel opens with an optimistic buzz as college best friends who moved to New York City five years ago are meeting for an annual holiday party. Fancy champagne is had, an engagement is on the horizon, a new romance is brewing, and one of them, the elusive but caring artist Irene, is avoiding all conversation about the lump she found under her eye. The seriousness of this lump is revealed early on, and the novel quickly becomes less about the intoxicating feelings of possibility the city offers to dynamic groups such as this and more about how tragedy can rip holes in this beautiful illusion. “No one was special” is a realization Irene’s friends come to at different points in their story together. It hits Sara, the micromanaging do-gooder, at Duane Reade while buying adult diapers for Irene. It affects George, Sara’s fiance, who feels helpless, and William, who has loved Irene from afar for years and must now consider the purpose of his life if she’s no longer there. While the story is set specifically in New York during the 2008 recession, and while Jansma seems to want the city to be the binding force that keeps these friends together, it’s Irene, and the power of her friendship, that achieves this best. “Irene…is a magnet,” George says, and it’s true that while the city gave the friends exciting lives, it’s friendship that makes them keep on living. “There are cities with just me, and cities with only you…and even one city that we all, each of us, believe in, that never fully leaves us.” Perhaps unintentionally, Jansma’s emotional tale shows that a city can be encompassed by a person.
This story is sad and sometimes overly sentimental, but Jansma’s narrative shines when he moves away from the collective experience and focuses on the lasting impact of individual moments.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42660-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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