De Luca writes like a dream, passionately but not effusively, and he treats his characters with both respect and affection.
De Luca lovingly, even rapturously, explores familiar territory with bittersweet romanticism.
The unnamed narrator is 16, smack in the middle of adolescence and spending the summer with his uncle on an island off the Neapolitan coast in the 1950s. His primary adult mentor, however, is Nicola, who fishes the uncle’s boat and goes about his daily tasks with taciturn placidity. The narrator develops a strong interest in, almost an obsession with, Italy’s role in World War II, and feels the adults in his family have some explaining to do. Meanwhile, a girl enters his life, in this case Caia, an orphan of Yugoslav descent now in boarding school in Switzerland and visiting a friend for the summer. Despite Nicola’s cautions, the narrator becomes smitten, even when he finds out she’s Jewish—in fact, in his eyes that increases both her exoticism and her appeal. As the summer progresses, the narrator and Caia develop a relationship, warm but nonsexual. While at first she’s sensitive about her heritage, eventually she allows him to pronounce her name “Chaiele,” with a decidedly Hebrew inflection. She also acknowledges the protective role he plays in her life by calling him Tateh, the name she had formerly used for her father. The narrator’s cousin Daniele, a few years older, is another role model for the narrator, especially when he gets in a brawl that comes about when some German tourists visiting the island start singing an anthem of the SS. The epiphany the narrator gets from this incident leads him to his own act of protest and destruction.
De Luca writes like a dream, passionately but not effusively, and he treats his characters with both respect and affection.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-47-9-5
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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