Fine work from a gifted writer who has important subject matter to explore.
British-Palestinian writer Dabbagh’s debut examines her people’s tragic past and conflicted present through the prism of one family’s experiences.
The Mujaheds are the sort of intellectual, nonreligious Palestinians who once formed the expatriate backbone of the struggle to reclaim their homeland, but who are rapidly being marginalized in Gaza. Indeed, Jibril, the father, has abandoned the Palestinian Liberation Organisation—and his wife and kids—for the consumerist narcolepsy of a Gulf state. Rashid, like his father, just wants to get out of Gaza and is thrilled in the opening pages to get a scholarship that will enable him to return to London and his English girlfriend Lisa. His twin sister Iman is frustrated by the Women’s Committee she’s joined, whose members disdain her as an outsider who’s only recently returned to Gaza. The only people who seem to share her thirst for meaningful action are the Islamic fundamentalists who gain credibility each time the Israeli army bombs civilian sites or bulldozes Palestinian homes. Their mother, once the most militant of all, is reduced to clipping newspaper articles and answering questions for a history of the movement being written by eldest son Sabri, who lost both his legs, his wife and his infant son in a car bombing facilitated by a Palestinian informer. Dabbagh unsparingly shows a people divided and demoralized by six decades of exile and powerlessness, and her novel quietly but acidly indicts Western ignorance of and indifference to the Palestinians’ plight. Yet, the book is also a finely wrought tale of family and coming-of-age that fulfills the mandates of any serious work of fiction: Dabbagh creates characters we care about, puts their equally valid but conflicting agendas into play and engineers an ending that brings individual satisfactions and some closure without ever suggesting that the larger dilemmas have been resolved.
Fine work from a gifted writer who has important subject matter to explore.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-876-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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