Chiladze discloses great insight into the nature of personal relationships—and into the mind of a psychiatrist.
A short novel of great psychological insight from an accomplished contemporary writer from Georgia (the country, not the state).
Chiladze focuses on relationships here—and the difficulty a psychiatrist has in separating his professional life from his personal life. The novel opens dramatically, with Ia, the wife of psychiatrist Levan, leaving him. She’s furious, an ironic emotion given that her ire is rooted in her husband’s preternatural calmness. Another tension between them involves their young daughter, Tamriko, because for many years, Ia had insisted she didn’t want any children—and in fact had pathological anxiety about giving birth. As we move from chapter to chapter, Chiladze frequently shifts point of view, one of the more interesting shifts being to the perspective of Nunu, a brilliant astrophysicist and former patient of Levan. After her husband commits suicide, she's moved to a hospital and later to a psychiatric ward, where she comes under the care of Levan. Another subplot involves Ana-Maria, wife of an ambassador, who has symptoms of depression and meets Levan at an embassy garden party. He doesn’t believe she’s truly ill, and they begin an affair. Levan persuades himself he’s in love with Ana-Maria, though in a moment of intense self-revelation, he admits to the confusion of his feelings. The affair ends in a blaze of emotional intensity as Levan’s past with both Ana-Maria and Nunu becomes more coherent.
Chiladze discloses great insight into the nature of personal relationships—and into the mind of a psychiatrist.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-093-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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