by Zeruya Shalev & translated by Dalya Bilu ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2000
Oddly unpleasant and yet somehow riveting.
A strange and somewhat strained tale of an extramarital affair: poet Shalev’s first fiction and a huge success in her native
Israel. Narrator Ya'arah is a graduate student living in Jerusalem with her pleasant if unexciting husband when she meets Aryeh, her father's best friend, a jaded but attractively bearish man who immediately both repels and attracts her. With surprising rapidity (surprising even to her), she falls into an on-and-off affair with him, depicted in increasingly explicit terms, gradually undermining not only her marriage but her already shaky academic career as well. Things come to a messy peak when his wife dies and her husband plans to take her on a long-deferred honeymoon, at which point she goes to the older man to comfort him, knowing that this can only precipitate an irreparable breach in her marriage. Shalev tells this somewhat banal story in a torrential first-person stream-of-consciousness narration. The tone—a tumbling welter of clauses strung together into lengthy run-on sentences—reflects the impulsive, willful mind of the narrator, but the effect on the reader quickly becomes numbing. And the pace of the story is often blunted by lengthy, uninspired philosophical discussions. On the other hand, its complex architecture, built on a series of slowly disclosed revelations of the past connections between her parents and her lover, provides a certain fascinating force. Regrettably, much of that force is vitiated by the narrative voice, which is petulant, self-involved, self-dramatizing, and emotionally disproportionate to many of the quotidian events driving the plot. Still, Bilu's translation is quite good, which may work to the book's advantage.
Oddly unpleasant and yet somehow riveting.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1655-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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by Zeruya Shalev ; translated by Sondra Silverston
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by Zeruya Shalev ; translated by Philip Simpson
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by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
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
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by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
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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