A novel that works on many levels—the personal, the political and even the mythological.
This Adam and “Evi” are a couple in the decidedly non-Edenic world of East Germany in 1989. Adam is a tailor, and a good one, who makes gorgeous clothes for women. And while he loves to dress them, unfortunately for Evi he also loves to undress them, and his infidelities ultimately become too much for her to bear, especially once she catches him in flagrante delicto. She takes off for greener pastures in the West, closely followed by Adam. Along the way Adam links up with Katja, a young woman whom he helps smuggle through the Hungarian border. While Adam and Katja don’t have quite an affair, they’re obviously attracted to one another—as Evi is to her traveling companion Michael. The narrative becomes one of a journey, as characters continue moving toward freedom and away from the confines of their original “garden.” Eventually they end up in West Germany on the eve of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Adam’s pursuit of his Evi is not in vain, and she finds herself still attracted to him. All of the characters’ lives get even more complicated when Evi discovers she’s pregnant and is not sure who the father is. Schulze’s clever plotting works on parallel tracks, so when Evi exclaims to Katja that Adam “acts like he’s the first and only person on earth,” the resonance goes all the way back to Genesis. A novel rich in dialogue and in its examination of a contemporary fall from grace.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27281-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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