Quiet but powerful; fans of Modiano’s smoky, humid postwar world will enjoy this slowly unfolding mystery.
Modiano’s transitional novel, first published in 1981, that marked an end to literary experimentation in favor of his largely unadorned though deeply atmospheric style.
Modiano’s novel opens on an uncharacteristically idyllic note, although, as with his other work, it immediately turns in search of a moment of lost time. Odile and Louis are just about to turn 35, and now, as she gazes out at her children playing on the alpine lakefront lawn, Odile is feeling the pangs of fading youth. “Does life ever start over at thirty-five?” she wonders. “She had the feeling that the answer was No. You reach a zone of total calm and the pedal-boat glides all by itself across a lake like the one stretching out before her.” Rewind 15-odd years, to the end of the war, and Odile and Louis, still teenagers, are innocents caught up in a much different world and a much different demimonde. Fresh out of the army, Louis meets a shadowy fellow, Brossier, who wears a feather-festooned Tyrolean hat, perhaps not the best of disguises, and says he’s in the car business. Just what it is that he does isn’t ever quite clear, but he enlists Louis in the enterprise and fills his pockets with money, even as Odile is struggling to make it as a chanteuse in a world that still has Edith Piaf. Brossier has big plans for Louis, though always of a vague sort, and shifting duties: “Now, when I say ‘night watchman,’ ” he says of one job possibility, “in fact it’s more of a job as a…secretary….” Only gradually does Louis become uneasy about the ill-defined nature of his duties as compared to his large pay packet, but he's too much the naif to recognize what the knowing reader will—namely, that a postcard bearing Guy Burgess’ signature puts us into different territory altogether, lending Modiano’s matter-of-fact mood study a dangerous dimension.
Quiet but powerful; fans of Modiano’s smoky, humid postwar world will enjoy this slowly unfolding mystery.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59017-955-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
