The thousands of readers who loved Corelli’s Mandolin have waited impatiently for its author’s next novel, so one...
De Bernières’s first book since his immensely popular fourth novel, Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), is a slender collection of 15 brief interrelated tales about a legendary mutt (1971–79) who became the beloved honorary “mate” of laborers in the salt- and iron-works of northwestern coastal Australia.
Variously named “Tally,” “Red Dog,” and “Bluey,” he’s a “Red Cloud kelpie, a fine old Australian breed of sheepdog” renowned for his restlessness, voracious appetite and libido, and quite remarkable flatulence. De Bernières recounts a series of only mildly interesting adventures in which Red Dog roams the countryside and “bush” (“hitching rides” in vehicles whose engine noises he memorizes), bonds with a half-Maori bus driver named John, who becomes the vagrant canine’s de facto master (until he dies of injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident), and with other smitten humans, hooks up with the equally ornery “Red Cat” (a feline brawler who becomes Red Dog’s unlikely friend), and circumvents the disapproval of Aussie animal-haters everywhere. The story has some charm, but it’s awfully slack, its paragraphs swollen by pointless filler (Red Dog’s women friends “shopped for souvenirs, but didn’t find anything that they really liked,” etc.). The dog himself (“this obstinate, valiant soul who seemed such a typical Western Australian”) has an appealing grittiness, but the adults who adore him are, to varying degrees, generic and/or moronic—and the critter’s demise provokes a protracted volley of sentimental farewells as fulsome as those that accompanied the passing of Dickens’s Little Nell.
The thousands of readers who loved Corelli’s Mandolin have waited impatiently for its author’s next novel, so one understands why this innocuous little non-book was published. But why was it written?Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42155-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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