Intelligent, impassioned, and compelling, Bohman's latest explores complex inner worlds with great sensitivity and insight.
A perceptive novel about early-middle-age angst as an art history professor realizes the constraints on her sexual and professional lives.
Karolina Andersson seems to have, if not the perfect life, at least a lot more to be contented with than to be dissatisfied over. She’s a professor at the University of Stockholm and has a rich intellectual life as well as interesting colleagues. But, now in her early 40s, she’s coming off a failed long-term relationship and feels restless and disaffected. Lacking self-confidence, Karolina feels herself floundering and wanting “to make life seem not quite so pointless,” so she begins to focus on Anton Strömberg, a graduate student whose research she’s supposed to supervise. Ironically, she’s never met him because he’s been spending time in Berlin trying to track down information on his dissertation subject, Ebba Ellis, an obscure Swedish artist who spent much of her career in Germany. Unexpectedly and abruptly, he shows up in Stockholm to introduce himself to Karolina, and despite her initial antipathy, she starts to find herself drawn to him, at least in part because he is everything Karolina is not—young, brash, and self-assured. Eventually, they have a brief but intense sexual encounter, a connection that Karolina knows is not wise, though she can’t seem to help herself. Karolina’s personal and professional crises intersect with even greater intensity when she realizes Strömberg might be faking some elements of his research, and she wonders whether he’s trying to manipulate her. Bohman (The Other Woman, 2016, etc.) is an adroit novelist with deep insights into the mind and heart of Karolina, a complex character whose restlessness, irresolution, and search for meaning make every one of her actions, both hesitancies and uncertainties, plausible and psychologically rich.
Intelligent, impassioned, and compelling, Bohman's latest explores complex inner worlds with great sensitivity and insight.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-159051-893-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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.
