As eye-catching as graffiti, but lacking the emotional power of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2006).
This fourth and final novel by the acclaimed Ivoirian (1927–2003), published in France in 2000, combines an invented child-soldier’s story with that of a gallery of real warlords.
The narrator, Birahima, a ten-year-old who loves to cuss, belongs to the Malinké tribe of Ivory Coast—“Black Nigger African Natives”—a constant refrain; but Birahima has access to four different dictionaries, and he proudly parades definitions (an over-used device). In this way, Kourouma sets up a tension between the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The self-styled street kid drops out of village school after third grade (the dictionaries come later)—his father died young; his mother after injuries incurred in the ceremony of excision (clitoris removal). The village elders decide Birahima must join his aunt, who has fled from her abusive husband to Liberia, so in June 1993, he begins his journey, accompanied by Yacouba, a village hotshot, a money multiplier and marabout (fortune-teller) bedecked in grigris (amulets). This is a world saturated in history and superstitions, which coexist with Islam and Christianity; what’s new are the child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Eager to join them, Birahima gets his chance soon enough and is given a kalash (AK-47). He participates in the killing, and sees fellow child-soldiers killed in a kind of dark vaudeville. His quest for his aunt is put on hold while the author offers thumbnail sketches of Liberian warlords such as Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson. Kourouma then delves (too deeply) into a ribald history of factional blood-letting in Sierra Leone; top billing goes to Foday Sankoh, that notorious amputator of hands and arms. ECOMOG, the Nigerian-dominated peacekeeping force, is also pilloried. The author’s implicit message is that all the players, religions included, have failed a generation of young Africans.
As eye-catching as graffiti, but lacking the emotional power of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2006).Pub Date: May 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-27957-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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