Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now...
The collision of personal and political agendas and ideals is analyzed with radiant precision and wit in the 1991 Nobel laureate’s ninth collection: eight adamantine stories and two ambitious novellas.
Several of the former are commandingly terse, including the parabolic title story, in which an earthquake reveals both a cluttered ocean floor and the consequences in store for “scavengers” who scurry to its depths; a wry tale of inchoate sexual surrender (“The Diamond Mine”); the monologue of an assassin visiting the grave of his widely beloved victim (“Homage”); and a mordant peek at the transitory nature of earthly pleasures seen in the context of a malarial mosquito’s lurking presence (“An Emissary”). Gordimer’s underappreciated comic gift sparkles in “The Generation Gap,” a beautifully handled tale showing how adult children react when their aging father leaves their mother for a much younger woman. It’s a rich revelation of generational and gender incompatibility and miscommunication, which ends with a jolt as Gordimer engineers a sudden shift of viewpoint. She’s a brilliant technician, as evidenced by a masterly style that blends serpentine discursive sentences with crisp, clipped fragments: the effect is of a roving intelligence constantly surprised, and stimulated to further exploration, by its own insights. Her methods work to near-perfection in the novellas “Karma,” in which a deceased insurance executive’s spirit makes successive returns to earth (as, e.g., a male, a female, a stillborn baby) “to continue his experience in another place, time”; and in its counterpart, “Mission Statement,” the story of a middle-aged Englishwoman, Roberta Blayne, who works for an international aid agency in an impoverished African nation, where she has a sexual relationship with a native “Deputy Director of Land Affairs”—but declines the opportunity to become his “second wife.” The tale’s an amazingly compact study of racial and social divisions and their stifling denial of individual freedom.
Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing. Maybe they should give her the Nobel Prize again.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-19090-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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