There’s no denying Whitbread Award winner Cusk’s talent and gimlet eye for revealing details, but she used to have more...
Diamond-hard portrait of family life as warfare.
Sometimes it’s a simmering conflict, like Thomas and Tonie Bradshaw experiencing confusion and resentment over their redefined roles as he takes a leave of absence to care for their daughter Alexa when Tonie is promoted from part-time lecturer to full-time head of her university’s English department. Sometimes it’s loud, disorderly combat, prompted by Thomas’ brother Howard perennially augmenting the chaos in his household while wife Claudia wails that all these kids and animals and stuff are keeping her from painting. It can be ugly hand-to-hand maneuvers for advantage, as the men’s father, Charles, refuses to have tea because his wife is late, or forces her to get rid of six boxes containing childhood mementos, which she weepily manipulates Thomas into storing in his much smaller house. Or it can be the detonation of really nasty landmines: “What a waste!” moans Mrs. Swann when daughter Tonie proudly displays new curtains she had made from antique silk. “I’ve got boxes of old pairs I could have given you…all beautifully lined, with proper pelmets.” Only the youngest Bradshaw brother Leo and his wife Susie don’t seem aggressive—and that’s because they’re drunk most of the time, as their young children are well aware. The Swanns and elder Bradshaws are cold, withholding monsters, Claudia is a professional martyr, Howard is jovially clueless, Leo and Susie are drowning in insecurity; Thomas and Tonie, though more substantially characterized, are no more engaging. The plot, such as it is, lurches forward during Thomas’ year at home as he becomes unmoored and Tonie is tempted by infidelity, developments that both play a role in Alexa’s near-fatal bout of meningitis. Somehow it’s no surprise that this dark tale climaxes with the dog dying.
There’s no denying Whitbread Award winner Cusk’s talent and gimlet eye for revealing details, but she used to have more compassion for human frailty than she’s displayed in her recent work (The Last Supper, 2009, etc.).Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-10081-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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