Unusual and sophisticated work from a gifted newcomer who has the skills to become an equally promising novelist.
A varied, highly interesting debut collection of ten stories by an award-winning Washington State writer.
Harun’s penchant for taking a bizarre premise and filling it in with persuasive if eccentric details is reminiscent, here and there, of Flannery O’Connor. You can also feel the influence of Shirley Jackson in “The Unseen Ear of God,” a terse fable in which a community exacts a possibly supernatural revenge on sexual predators, and the contours of folklore and myth in “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a ruthlessly compact portrayal of a “haunted” marriage (which ought perhaps to have been developed at greater length) and “The Closed Sea,” a tale of a fishing village’s temptation by the promise of endless abundance that reads like something out of The Arabian Nights. Of the more conventionally realistic stories, two feature the exotic and benign figure of Natife, a Nigerian exchange student whose primeval, earth-centered wisdom contrasts fruitfully with the emotional confusion of a depressed rich girl (in “Lukudi”) and a small boy (in “The King of Limbo”) whose despairing remoteness from his separated parents takes the form of childish fantasies of adventure and heroism. Harun raises domestic drama to impressive heights in a subtly handled portrait of a young woman who loses her newborn baby and thereafter distrusts everyone and fears everything (“Accidents”); a neat little horror story about a saturnine New Jersey woman whose well-meaning husband may have exposed her to the attention of a serial murderer (“The Highwayman”); and “The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus” (a Nelson Algren Award winner), in which a reclusive widower becomes the pseudonymous “voice” of his hometown (Saltish Bay, a northwestern hamlet where several of these stories are set) raised in opposition to a greedy developer, the victim of a vengeful woman, and, to his amazement, once again his estranged son’s father.
Unusual and sophisticated work from a gifted newcomer who has the skills to become an equally promising novelist.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-193-2
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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