A digressive but attention-grabbing critique of war’s horrors.
A platoon of soldiers assigned to maintain order winds up doing anything but in this pointed military satire.
The collective “we” narrating this novel by Serbian-born novelist Albahari (Learning Cyrillic, 2014, etc.) insists that the checkpoint they’re guarding was opened with the best of intentions, albeit the vaguest of purposes. “We hadn’t been told whether the checkpoint was on a border lying between two countries or along a line dividing two villages,” Albahari writes. At first the checkpoint is so quiet as to seem unnecessary, but a parade of disruptions, most of them violent, soon arrives: a dead sentry with a slashed throat, two disemboweled locals, a corporal hanged from a tree, a mass of asylum-seeking refugees. The novel is delivered in one long paragraph, as if to suggest that all the violent and absurd chaos of military life is rightfully stuffed into one massive ball of mortality and dysfunction. Albahari occasionally plays that idea for comic effect, skewering the disorder of the chain of command and the ineptitude of the checkpoint’s commander. Though the checkpoint is all but neglected, somehow a mail delivery arrives; when photographers arrive to document the turmoil, the commander’s first thought is charging them a fee. (“You’ll see that Visa and MasterCard are our sponsors,” he says.) In that regard the book is a worthy descendant of The Good Soldier Svejk and Catch-22, though when Albahari gets dark (as every military satire must), he gets very dark; rapes, beheadings, and vicious stabbings are all part of the territory. Albahari’s rambling narration oversells the theme of the madness of war, but there’s no questioning his passion on the subject. An honest war story only emerges “once it conforms to the government’s truth,” he asserts. This novel celebrates fiction’s capacity to critique the party line.
A digressive but attention-grabbing critique of war’s horrors.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63206-192-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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