Poignant meditation on the enduring lure of home and the cost of being left behind.
After decades in France, a Moroccan immigrant yearns to return to his native village.
Retirement holds little appeal for former autoworker Mohammed Ben Abdallah, who would just as soon keep on going to the Renault plant that has been his home-away-from-home for the past 40 years. The sudden (if not unexpected) loss of his workday routine has him at loose ends, leaving him too much time to ponder his life and contemplate its end. Four out of his five children are grown and out of the house, and he barely speaks to his wife, who is also his cousin. He loves his kids, but wishes they were less European. Their disinterest in their heritage eats away at him. Coming across as a thoroughly decent man, Mohammed takes great comfort in his Muslim faith, and has nothing but contempt for the imams in his community who foment radicalism. He is still, though, a product of his culture. He disowns his daughter Jamila when she chooses to marry an Italian man, and is only somewhat cognizant of the political unrest in the French immigrant community. He understandably finds it difficult to comprehend why a group of local youths would burn down his car. And it is this discomfort with the modernity of his adopted home that spurs him to take a trip back to his village, where he is building a home. Hoping to use the house to lure his family back to the Magreb, he builds an extravagant mansion that defies both taste and common sense. Energized by his new purpose, but unaware of the reality of the situation, he slips into a mystical state that makes it increasingly impossible for the family he values so much to reach him. Jelloun’s (Leaving Tangier, 2009, etc.) haunting novel reads like a timeless fable, while taking on the oh-so-timely challenges of the immigrant experience.
Poignant meditation on the enduring lure of home and the cost of being left behind.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311847-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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