An absorbing work from a fascinating mind.
Three generations of polar bears navigate life as celebrities among humans.
Japanese author Tawada’s (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 2012, etc.) latest novel revisits her themes of cultural alienation and ephemerality as she follows three generations—grandmother, mother, and son—of intrepid polar bears, each getting a separate chapter. The grandmother, a naïve but brilliant ex–circus performer who lives in the Soviet Union, writes an autobiography which becomes an overnight literary hit in Europe. Inadvertently, it leads to her political exile in Canada, where she's forced to abandon her native Russian, a language that once “remained at my side, touching soft spots within me.” Her daughter, Tosca, a former ballet dancer living in East Germany, joins the circus and becomes ensconced in an intimate relationship with her emotionally fragile trainer, Barbara—the two communicate secretly, while Barbara sleeps, in a “sphere situated halfway between the animal and human worlds.” As the familiar subtly descends into the bizarre, Tawada lithely undulates between past and present, subconscious and reality. In the final chapter, Tosca’s estranged son, Knut, spends his days playing with Matthias, his human keeper (and stand-in mother), before a captive audience at the Berlin Zoo. Soon after Matthias is forced to leave the zoo, Knut begins to receive nightly visits from Michael, a man “as smooth and elegant as a black panther,” whose hardships bear an uncanny resemblance to Knut’s. It’s uncertain whether Michael’s omnipresence is real, a vivid apparition—sometimes he watches Knut from a cloud, other times he speaks to him from a glowing computer screen—or perhaps Knut’s moral conscience personified. But this persistent mystery is what is so enchanting about Tawada’s writing. Her penetrating irony and deadpan surrealism fray our notions of home and combine to deliver another offbeat tale.
An absorbing work from a fascinating mind.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2578-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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