A broody tale of gay love and life behind the Iron Curtain.
A young gay man enters into a clandestine affair in the repressive political climate of communist Poland in the early 1980s.
From his new home in the Polish community of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Ludwik addresses this narrative to Janusz, the handsome university student he met at an agricultural “work education” camp outside Warsaw in the summer of 1980. His first sighting of Janusz is a pure coup de foudre, described in typically swoony terms: “A flash of heat traveled from my stomach to my cheeks, my thoughts jumbled like a ball of string….It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.” Their summer romance, initiated during a hiking trip to the lake district, is an idyll that cannot last; the gray realities of Warsaw life—food and medicine shortages, tight party control over university advancement, an emerging protest movement subject to crackdown—will come between the lovers. While Ludwik imagines leaving the country to escape its oppressions (James Baldwin’s novel of gay expatriate life in Paris, Giovanni’s Room, is a touchstone), Janusz dates Hania, the daughter of an apparatchik, in order to enjoy special privileges. “Everyone is leading someone on,” Janusz explains. “So what’s wrong with taking things into your own hands and not letting yourself go under?” Their conflict comes to a head during a debauched weekend at the country estate of Hania’s family, leading Ludwik toward his eventual fate. Debut novelist Jedrowski, born to Polish parents in Germany and now living in France, writes confidently in English—though his prose can turn overripe and his characters feel undernourished.
A broody tale of gay love and life behind the Iron Curtain.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289000-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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