Continuous pleasures, of character and language, in a book about life itself, with never a false note.
Second-novelist Sebastian (The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, 1998) returns with a tone-perfect and powerfully engaging tale of a rural spinster who wonders what life can possibly be for.
Never far from Annie Dunne’s mind are memories and tales of Ireland during the high old days of respect, stability, wealth, and country estates—back before independence from England. For five generations, Annie’s own family had the status of being stewards of the great Humewood estate in County Wicklow—a position that “went from father to son without a break for a hundred years like a proper kingship.” But war, independence, and taxes brought all that to an end, though even then Annie’s father achieved prominence, becoming “chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, B Division”—until he died destitute and mad. Now it’s 1959 and Annie herself, born in 1900, orphaned, deformed by a polio-caused hunchback, unmarried, having spent the prime of her life raising her three motherless nephews, finds the only niche left for her in the world with her spinster relative Sarah Cullen, two years her senior, on her tiny little dirt-poor farm in Wicklow. There, life for the two women is orderly, clean, thrifty—and bone-achingly hard work. When one of Annie’s grown nephews leaves his children for the summer, a boy near five and his slightly older sister, Annie’s entire life seems cast into question again—especially when it seems Sarah might actually marry the neighborhood’s opportunistic Billy Kerr, thus sending Annie away from her last home, to probable penury. Can Annie manage the children, quell her own fears, doubts, and surfacing anger—and also survive the vile taunts that Billy Kerr throws at her secretly for her privileged family past. Over the summer, disaster will threaten and the grace of daily life return as readers will listen, enchanted, to the passionately intelligent inward voice of Annie Dunne.
Continuous pleasures, of character and language, in a book about life itself, with never a false note.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03112-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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