An impressively quiet book that addresses important themes with intelligence and empathy.
East African novelist Gurnah (Paradise, 1994, etc.) luminously weaves together themes of alienation, treachery, and despair, in a story about two political exiles, in a drab English seaside town, whoat last find forgiveness and understanding.
When aging Saleh Omar, a Zanzibar native, arrives in England seeking asylum, he claims not to speak English. He also calls himself Rajab Shaaban, a name he has borrowed for reasons that soon become clear. As Omar settles into a small apartment provided by immigration authorities, he spends his days checking out the local furniture stores and recalling the past. He recalls the prosperous furniture shop he ran, the loan he secured for Hussein, a seafaring merchant from Bahrain, that would cause him and the story's other protagonist so much trouble. Meanwhile, poet and professor Latif Mahmud, also from Zanzibar, having been alerted by the authorities that a fellow Zanzibari might need help with translation, looks back at his own past. As order broke down in Zanzibar after it gained independence from Britain, Latif accepted a scholarship to study in the former East Germany, escaping soon after to Britain. He still holds Omar responsible for his family’s decline: his mother took lovers, his father became an alcoholic, and their house was repossessed. When the two men finally remeet, the embittered Latif accuses Omar not only of stealing his father’s name, Rajab Shabaan, but his property. Omar then relates how he honorably inherited the Shabaan property only to lose it; how, in the political turmoil, he was imprisoned on false charges by Latif’s family; how he belatedly learned of the death of his wife and only child; and how he managed to escape further persecution by fleeing under an assumed name. With these confessions, both men find a satisfying cloture with hints of fuller lives to come.
An impressively quiet book that addresses important themes with intelligence and empathy.Pub Date: June 11, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-658-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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