A semi-epistolary tale powered by what’s repressed and unsayable.
An unusual translation assignment offers a harrowing glimpse into post-Tiananmen repression in China.
Iona is a London translator who’s been asked to look over a stash of Chinese letters and diary entries that have mysteriously made their way into a publisher’s hands. What she uncovers is a mix of dissident rhetoric and heartbreak that turns on one couple's story. Jian, she learns, is a rock musician whose lyrics and writings riled Chinese authorities, who banished him from the country; he eventually lands in England, then heads to France. Mu, his lover, is a musician and poet herself, repurposing Allen Ginsberg's poetry to register her own protest about her homeland, albeit while safely on tour in the United States. Over the course of almost a year, Iona pieces together the history of Mu and Jian’s relationship from the mid-1990s to the present. Guo generally restricts the perspective to Iona, a smart strategy in that it dramatizes her slow awakening to the politics and culture that barricaded Mu and Jian from each other. The downside is that she gives Iona little personality; apart from an interest in Chinese language and culture and the occasional one-night stand, her character is largely blank. As the novel deepens, though, the camera shifts more often to Jian's and Mu’s points of view, underscoring the emotional turmoil that’s hard to register in letters and diaries and even more difficult to translate. There’s some stiffness to Guo’s prose, and some plot turns are too tidily machined. (There’s a needlessly delayed revelation about Jian, for instance, and a melodramatic near-miss between two characters toward the climax.) The strength of the novel is within Mu’s and Jian's writings, which come in a variety of forms: brash manifestos, heartsick poetry, coded messages. Though Iona is little more than a bridge between the two, the story she’s stumbled over is an affecting one.
A semi-epistolary tale powered by what’s repressed and unsayable.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53871-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
