Clumsy as rallying cries go but otherwise a graceful vision of a slower, more emotionally in-touch way of life.
A writer ponders the sustainability of both her relationships and the environment in this autobiographical novel-in-diary-entries.
The narrator of this novel by an Icelandic poet and occasional Björk collaborator is dating an ornithologist, nicknamed Birdy, and is close to her brother, an archaeologist named Owlie. Convenient gigs, given that her chief concerns in this book are love, nature, and history, which she explores during her hiking and camping trips through Iceland as well as during brief detours to England and France. She goes bird-watching on a beach; ponders settling down and having kids in Reykjavik; visits ancient settlements, gravesites, and museums; explores the profundity of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics; and generally contemplates the meaning of home. (“A place of experimentation and discovery...where the most natural in each individual can be developed.”) At her best, these ramblings suggest a modern-day Walden, in which a writer communes with the environment to better contemplate the complexities of being. She quotes other writers often (including Thoreau): visiting William Wordsworth’s home, for instance, she’s moved to ask, “Why not renew Romanticism, re-clarify the relationship between creation and memory?” Left to her own devices, though, her musings sometimes drift into freshman-dorm–ish philosophizing. (“No, not back to nature, but forward! Forward to nature!” “I think that farmers should be psychoanalyzed, and rethink their connections with the earth and masculinity.”) Yet there’s something admirably consistent about her vision of stewardship—of life, of relationships, of land—that makes her political naiveté forgivable. When she writes about the charm and beauty of the places she visits, you want to pitch a tent right alongside her.
Clumsy as rallying cries go but otherwise a graceful vision of a slower, more emotionally in-touch way of life.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 9781632060747
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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