A gifted writer, Hall offers a compelling, lyrical story rich in observation and symbolism.
Hall (The Beautiful Indifference, 2013, etc.) explores the emotional turmoil following a wildlife biologist's return home to Lowther Valley in England's Cumbria.
Rachel may be a native Cumbrian, but she’s dwelt for a decade near Idaho’s Chief Joseph Peak, monitoring the wolf reintroduction, when she receives word from England that her mother is fading. She’s also received a generous offer from Thomas Pennington, Earl of Annerdale, who wants her to reintroduce wolves into a controlled environment on his vast Cumbrian estate. During a visit home, she makes a spare reconciliation with her prickly mother and rejects the earl’s offer; then she’s back in Idaho and finds herself pregnant by a friend and co-worker. That discovery comes simultaneously with word of her mother’s suicide, and Rachel decides to accept Pennington’s offer. She intends to have an abortion in Cumbria, but "delaying, ruminating, caught between states," she chooses motherhood. Telling the story in simple, crystalline sentences and punctuation-free dialogue, Hall peppers the narrative with diamond-hard phrases: a wolf’s eyes are "keen as gold, sorrowless"; an old-growth Cumbrian forest is a "dark old republic." Centering the story are the wolves: "ghost-like, elegant, frivolous"; "never without enemies, they are too successful a creature, too good at what they do." Hall also deftly carves characters—Pennington’s troubled son, Leo, with "a crackle around him: an unwellness, an ill-mood"; and the entitled and privileged earl himself, "subject to different laws of gravity, that’s all." As Rachel, "a creature hostage to maternity, metamorphosed," plunges into love with her newborn son, the wolf project is sabotaged when a gate is deliberately left open, a point at which Hall binds the narrative threads together in a satisfying conclusion.
A gifted writer, Hall offers a compelling, lyrical story rich in observation and symbolism.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-220847-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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