Faulks knows exactly how to keep the reader off-balance in this deft, funny, scary combination of suspense and psychic...
The gifted British Faulks (Human Traces, 2006, etc.) rings changes on the untrustworthy narrator technique with this titillating, ultimately engrossing study of a loner with a dark past.
Mike Engleby is at Cambridge University in 1973, a student from a poor background on a full scholarship. As he tells us his story, often engagingly (his vignettes of the faculty are razor-sharp), it becomes clear he keeps to himself, whether he’s drinking, doing drugs or driving around country villages. But the name of one fellow student keeps coming up: Jennifer Arkland. He goes to lectures with her and later, as one of the crew, participates in an experimental student film in Ireland; Jennifer has a lead role. However, when he steals a letter she’s written to her parents, he realizes he’s just a footnote in her life, a joke. Mike started stealing at Chatfield, the terrifying private boarding school he attended, also on scholarship; it boosted his “morale,” which needed boosting after incessant vicious bullying by older boys and beatings by his father. What’s really chilling, though, is Mike’s casual admission that in time he became a vicious bully himself. Back in Cambridge, the big news is that Jennifer has disappeared. The police search Mike’s rooms, but fail to discover Jennifer’s diary, Mike’s latest theft. Might Mike have “stolen” Jennifer? Possibly, but it’s a big leap from obsession to abduction, though he’s clearly maladjusted, unlike Jennifer (the marvelous diary entries reveal a radiantly happy, normal young woman). Life goes on, Jennifer is not found and Mike eventually becomes a successful journalist in London. Then the past returns, and it is devastating. If Mike has not been leveling with us, it’s because of involuntary memory loss. We finally learn the gripping truth about what happened in Cambridge, even as we ponder the nature of the self.
Faulks knows exactly how to keep the reader off-balance in this deft, funny, scary combination of suspense and psychic exploration.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52405-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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