No one will miss the message here, but Djaout has also given us a story as steeped in the beauty of North Africa as in the...
The first English translation of this 1991 winner of the French Prix Mediterranée, whose author was assassinated in 1993 by Islamic extremists in Algeria, follows publication of Djaout’s remarkable The Last Summer of Reason (2001) and further shows the loss literature has sustained.
Djaout’s claustrophobic, at times Kafkaesque tale begins with the aging Menouar, a simple former shepherd and veteran of the Algerian resistance, coping with the summer heat in a suburb of the coastal city where he now lives. A busybody, he has noticed lights at night in a house he’d believed to be empty; these turn out to be evidence of the labor of Mahfoudh, an inventor from the city using the house as a quiet studio for finishing his work on a revolutionary loom design. When Mahfoudh tries to apply for a patent at the town office, he encounters such hostility from the bureaucrats, who have never dealt with a patent application before, that he decides to pursue matters back in the city. There, he encounters further resistance when he applies for a passport to attend an inventor’s fair in Germany, attracting police suspicion because he had once been arrested—a decade before, at a student demonstration. Meanwhile, his studio has come under surveillance by a vigilante veterans’ group that includes Menouar. For an inscrutable reason, however, Mahfoudh receives his passport, and, when he travels to the fair, a prize for his invention. Although he has to endure an almost surreal set of hurdles just to get his loom model back into Algeria, he is proclaimed a local and national hero—though his turnabout has lethal consequences for the unsuspecting Menouar.
No one will miss the message here, but Djaout has also given us a story as steeped in the beauty of North Africa as in the darkness threatening those who call it home.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-886913-54-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ruminator Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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