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THE COLOR OF SUMMER

Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his...

Fourth volume of the late (1943–90) Cuban writer’s semiautobiographical “pentagony” (Arenas’s word), written in 1991 as part of a five-volume sequence (The Palace of White Skunks, 1990, etc.).

The rambling, free-form fantasy begins—smashingly—with a 50-page verse play, “The Flight of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.” The premise of this hilariously obscene set piece is the attempted escape to Miami of its eponymous heroine, a politically suspect poet, from the clutches of an island dictator named “Fifo”—who’s celebrating the 40th anniversary of his reign (declared the 50th, because that “round number” pleases the vainglorious tyrant). Fifo orders all his late political enemies recalled to life (for publicity purposes, but also for the pleasure of murdering them again)—and Arenas is off to the races: sketching the literary and (homo)sexual adventures of several locally famous “queens” and also his own several alter egos (Gabriel, “Skunk in a Funk,” et al); tossing off miscellaneous metafictional inventions (“Pensées,” “Tongue-Twisters,” interpolated satirical broadsides); reinventing traditional structure (the novel’s Foreword appears in its midsection)—all the while subjecting Fifo’s megalomaniacal posturing to elegant and devastating abuse. Examples: upon being informed that California apples can’t be grown on his island, Fifo declares this agricultural injustice is another illustration of capitalist aggression; a specially bred “Bloodthirsty Shark” patrols nearby waters, sniffing out would-be emigrants; a saint (Nelly) reputed to have been gay is marked for “decanonization”; the assassinations of rival heads of state are accomplished via anal intercourse, with that ultimate sexual weapon, “The Electric Venus”: on and on the scurrilous merriment goes. Yet beneath the grotesqueries, it’s plaintively clear that the story offers (as do all Arenas’s books, in some measure) “a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes . . . [have] been subjected” through the ages, and especially in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his cigars.

Pub Date: July 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-670-84065-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000

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THINGS FALL APART

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

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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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