Affecting in its guileless way, if ultimately predictable.
A lurid chronicle of a young man’s slow decline into heroin addiction; this novel, the author’s debut, was originally self published.
The gateway drug for Luke isn’t alcohol or marijuana, but midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When we first meet the hero, he’s an awkward Atlanta teenager obsessed with sex and fed up with the way his stepfather, Victor, abuses his mother and younger brother. His escape hatch is a girl who introduces him to the folks who live for the cult film, and through them he quickly discovers the pleasures of weed, coke and LSD. But those three drugs eventually lose their glamour for Luke, and within two years he has dropped out of school and is shooting heroin. Daniels’ nearly artless style deflects overdramatization, with Luke plainly relating every bad move, every fit of anger toward his family and every moment of self-degradation. (A series of chapters in which he’s a film extra playing an imprisoned Union soldier is as allegorical as matters get.) Daniels’ pacing is strong as well; the episodic chapters, covering about four years in Luke’s life in the early ’90s (Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the O.J. trial and the Oklahoma City bombing are mentioned), make plain how slow the path to addiction is, yet how quickly it swallows a person up. The problem with all this verisimilitude, though, is that it doesn’t give Daniels much to work with: Luke’s life is a tiny one, circumscribed around scoring drugs, taking drugs, finding money to score drugs (a job laying flooring gives way to less dignified methods of getting money) and hanging out with druggy friends. Once Luke is deep into junkiedom halfway through the novel, Daniels often slips into a then-this-happened brand of storytelling which gets into the grotesque details of track marks and ODs but is void of characterization. In the end, the novel lacks a narrative worthy of its candor.
Affecting in its guileless way, if ultimately predictable.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-165683-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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