Works of art may overcome the living here, but artifice and insufferable blather do the job on its reader.
Reduced to a shadow of his former self in imitating Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Self (How the Dead Live, 2000) vaults into life’s viscera to lampoon England’s upper crust while skipping across the art/drug/gay culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dorian Gray this time around is initially the independently wealthy plaything of a video-installation artist, Baz, whose work Cathode Narcissus, with its iterated imagery of Dorian in the buff, is the combined product of Baz’s drooling passion for his subject and of a drug-laced modeling session. But Baz’s aristo friend and drug benefactor Henry Wotton also takes a guiding hand in Dorian’s development, and in the process a lascivious monster is born. Dionysian debaucheries consume Wotton and his coterie, culminating in a party to celebrate Baz’s installation, now in Dorian’s house, at which Herman, a homeless black hunk Dorian fancies, is so thoroughly used that he immediately goes back to his squat and ODs. A decade later, Baz, Wotton, and Dorian are all HIV-positive, the first two having already started their death spirals. Dorian, however, is still in the lip-smacking bloom of his youth (although something uncanny is happening to his image on the Narcissus videotapes); as Baz visits Wotton in a London AIDS ward, he recounts his adventures with Dorian in 1980s Manhattan, where the golden boy became the toast of the town while Baz kicked his drug habit. Dorian reenters their lives at a dinner party soon thereafter, but that same night Baz is butchered by the man he adored. Other grisly murders follow, as Dorian fights to protect his secret, but Wotton lingers on against all odds. He finally succumbs, though—leaving behind the manuscript that was the novel thus far, a work that triggers a startling transformation in Dorian when it comes into his hands.
Works of art may overcome the living here, but artifice and insufferable blather do the job on its reader.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1729-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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