Also from Zameenzad (see above): a well-meaning, often mystical story of children trying to survive in war-torn Africa—a story with special resonances considering the situation in Somalia but one that makes more for inspiration than literature. When Matt—a charismatic boy who's been converted to Christianity and who ``sees the pathways of the stars''—suggests that friends Golam, Hena, and the narrator bunk school and go to Gonta to see the famous Spirit Dance, the four embark on an adventure that soon becomes a dangerous odyssey. As they make their way through the forest, they stumble upon a guerrilla band that's captured a rival leader they are about to kill. The children rescue the prisoner, escape, and make it to Gonta, where they watch the dancing as well as make new friends—who will come in handy later as the situation in their country, devastated by drought and racked by civil war, deteriorates. Back home, seeing their village and families decimated by starvation, the children hope to find work in the big city and courageously set off again on another hazardous journey—but they are no longer the same innocents: Golam is haunted by his mother's madness and recent death, and Hena, whose father has lost all he had, is determined to become rich whatever the cost. They survive encounters with various armed groups and reach the city, but find life there even worse than back home—and far more dangerous. Hena deliberately becomes a rich man's whore, and the other three struggle to survive, only to be injured badly in a bombing raid on a refugee camp. They continue the journey, but their fate is inevitable. The friends and their families are reunited at last in the great spirit world beyond. Much powerful writing, and the events described have all too many parallels, but cumulatively more homily than novel.
Pub Date: April 13, 1993
ISBN: 0-14-013163-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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