Not equal to Schlink’s best.
Several “homecomings” are chronicled in this earnest, carefully layered novel from the German author.
The narrator and protagonist, World War II survivor Peter Debauer, repeatedly “returns” from idyllic visits to Switzerland, where his doting grandparents run a small publishing company; reunions with his somewhat distant widowed mother and with a sympathetic woman encountered during his travels; a reconnection with the young son born of his failed marriage; and, in the novel’s extended climax, a painful confirmation of long-held suspicions about the father he never knew. The mystery that compels and focuses Peter’s wandering attention is linked to a novel (published by his grandparents) about a German soldier’s homeward journey, from which crucial pages are missing. Realizing that the fictional soldier (Karl Hanke) is reenacting the experiences of Odysseus in Homer’s epic, and that Hanke’s experiences oddly echo some of his own, Peter broadens his search for details about his mother’s marriage, his father’s wartime ordeal and his own occluded relationship to both parents. What he learns informs his ultimate homecoming and his acknowledgement of the limits of how much we can ever know. This (literally) searching novel is laden with intriguing ideas, only some of which are persuasively dramatized. Schlink (Self’s Deception, 2007, etc.) skillfully handles complex Homeric parallels, pacing Peter’s discoveries expertly. A moving scene in which young Peter realizes that his grandparents are preparing for their deaths, and a stinging conversation with his mother (who does not want to remember the past), are deftly counterpointed against thematically ironic use of Nazi history and the later destruction of the Berlin Wall. But while the best pages offer an absorbing portrayal of a sobering quest for self-knowledge, the novel is redundant, and it drags.
Not equal to Schlink’s best.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42091-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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