The fourth and final installment in a ``Tetralogy of Elements'' (The Fountains of Neptune, etc.), in which novelist and illustrator Ducornet ``investigates the processes of fabulating, creating and remembering.'' Air is the element investigated in this last volume, which like its predecessors is filled with allusions, some obvious, some not; actual and imagined characters; and a story that's more a series of disparate set-pieces than a concentrated narrative. Here, Memory tells of her beautiful but mute elder sister, the eponymously named Etheria, ``a creature of light and air.'' The siblings' father is Angus Sphery, an eccentric scholar who believes that before the expulsion from Eden there existed a magical ``Primal Language spelled out phonetically by the planets'' and powerful enough ``to conjure the world of things.'' The family lives in Victorian Oxford and are befriended by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who is especially taken with Etheria's delicate beauty. When boorish tycoon Rudolph Tubbs falls in love with the adolescent Etheria, he presents her father with the chimera, a beautiful piece of jade—a gift that ensures the latter's consent to the marriage. The unhappy Etheria, however, soon leaves Tubbs, who then travels to Egypt with a mad architect and a circus performer who lives on air. Pyramids collapse, mummies turn into fertilizer, and Memory adds her own random insights, naturally about memory, which ``is like a jade cabinet...where the jade appears to be the same yet the mind is forever replacing it.'' An interesting thought, but not really relevant to the vanished Etheria, who, departing from her father's belief that language could unify all, has concluded the opposite. Rumored to be a magician, she's found ``the Word, surely a silent one,'' that can make everything disappear. Imaginative and beautifully crafted but crushed by recondite intellectual intentions. Too clever by half.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56478-021-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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