A cleareyed and convincing story of a family's doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.
Prizewinning Norwegian novelist Hjorth (Talk To Me, 2010, etc.) mines an inheritance dispute among four siblings to delve into the burden of family secrets and the ripple effects of early childhood trauma.
Bergljot, a divorced writer with three grown children, cut off contact with her parents years ago and has no expectation of being included in their will. But when there's a dispute over two summer cabins, she sides with her brother and finds herself pulled back into the family she has worked desperately to escape. "The street of my childhood," a friend remarks, quoting a Danish poet, "is the root of my being." Her childlike mother and her younger sisters want to deny her early abuse by their domineering father; her brother has his own damage to contend with. "What was it like to be a normal human being?" she wonders. "I didn't know." The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot's convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws. "The presence of my lost childhood, the constant return of this loss had made me who I was." She hates her mother for not being able to protect her but tries to feel compassion, even for her father. The drama heightens—there are confrontations, an overdose, a death, pleas for reconciliation, a sealed letter in a safe—but it's her desire to be believed and truly seen that drives the narrative forward. There are no easy resolutions here. Describing the night outside the pizzeria where she finally meets her mother again after years of estrangement, Bergljot says: "It was the kind of darkness that falls, the kind of darkness that flows and spreads, that penetrates buildings and houses and takes over no matter how many lights you turn on, no matter how many candles you put on the table and in the windowsills, no matter how many torches you light...a darkness full of knives."
A cleareyed and convincing story of a family's doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78873-310-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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