Almost certainly the oddest love story you’ll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges...
“All trees are incarnations of frustrated love.” So avers this beguiling novel by the writer whom J.M. Clezio has called Korea’s most likely Nobel Prize contender.
Ki-hyeon is a lascivious and shallow young man. As Lee’s story opens, with a somewhat fusty term, he is negotiating with a “lady of the night,” one of his conditions being that she remove her makeup. He approves of her “voluptuous breasts,” and then again of her “voluptuous body and gigantic breasts,” and then—well, it doesn’t matter, because he is not procuring the hooker for himself but instead for his brother Woo-hyeon, having taken over that duty from his mother. Say what? Yes, said brother has lost both legs in a military accident and, with them, much of his will to live, though when a bright young singer named Soon-mee enters the picture, the brother, glad to be done with sex for hire, perks up. Soon enough, he and Soon-mee are addressing each other in gigglingly mythical terms, he calling her his “nymph” and she calling him her “beast.” Ki-hyeon falls in love with Soon-mee himself, though there’s a tangle with a brutal brother-in-law to sort out. If you’re confused, only a bit into the book, there are more conundrums to come. Some are served up by a taciturn father who doesn’t have much to say about human affairs but insists that plants are more worthy of love than most people—which may explain why Woo-hyeon winds up, in a dreamlike conclusion, borrowing a page from the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne, “pray[ing] to be transformed into a tree.” But who is Apollo in the tale? Try to diagram the plot, and you might give yourself whiplash; at the very least, you’re likely to feel a little unmoored as the real world, such as it is, slips away into myth and dream.
Almost certainly the oddest love story you’ll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges and Kafka, and you’ll have some of the feel of this strange, enchanting tale.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-116-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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