An elegant voice from the past speaks lucidly in three fine long stories, all written decades ago by the late expatriate Russian author (1901—93) of The Accompanist (1988), The Tattered Cloak (1991), and many other works of fiction (most as yet untranslated into English). Berberova lived through the 1917 Revolution, then emigrated to Paris, and later (in 1950) to the US, where she would become a respected professor at Princeton. Her own experiences are perhaps most clearly reflected in the last of this volume’s stories, “The Big City” (1952), which renders a Russian ÇmigrÇ’s uneasy accommodation to his huge New York City apartment building as a hallucinatory clash of bizarre images, mingled with recurring memories of a dangerous childhood accident. The earlier “Zoya Andreyevna” (1927) records the emotional vacillations of an “independent” Russian woman who has left her husband, then lost her lover to the army, as she suffers the contempt of fellow boarders in a rundown rooming house. The story is rather marred by too much historical summary (its period is immediately pre-revolutionary) and needless statement of its themes; still, the manner in which Zoya Andreyevna’s loneliness and self-consciousness build to the brink of dementia is very nearly Chekhovian. Better still is the superb title piece, in which a mother’s and daughter’s vacation on the eve of the Revolution is shattered by the former’s sudden death and unavoidable burial far from home. Berberova’s point is this sheltered family’s slowness to comprehend the reality of the changes shaking their country—a point vividly underscored when the daughter, Margarita, returning years later (with her own young daughter) to reclaim her mother’s body, finds in place of the rustic town she had remembered a landscape altered beyond recognition, and her mother’s grave indistinguishable from many equally anonymous others. Moving and memorable stories, beautifully translated by Marian Schwartz. Here’s hoping she’s at work on more of Berberova’s fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-8112-1377-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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