Informative and direct storytelling from a corner of Africa that’s poorly understood in the West.
Snapshots of rural and urban life in Somalia, written by a refugee and concerned with the “morality that’s long been dead” there.
In the late 1980s, Yusuf fled his native country for America, where he learned English and began writing nonfiction, plays, and short stories. This debut collection has some flat plotting and clunky lines, but Yusuf is unquestionably talented, with a knack for stories focused on injustice and the anxiety of separation, be it over time or distance. In the fablelike closing story, a young man who’s separated from his fellow refugees in the midst of Somalia’s civil war is given unlikely safe harbor by a lion, with the implication that the dangerous animal has a more honorable moral system than the human leaders who’ve splintered the country. Yusuf delivers a similar point in a more realistic form in “A Delicate Hope,” about an aspiring writer who’s given an opportunity to move to Saudi Arabia and escape his country’s degradations (rampant violence, innocent youth pressed into military service) only to watch his hopes get dashed catastrophically. Five linked stories featuring a woman named Mayxaano focus on Somali life more removed from military strife: She grew up an outcast (“Midgaan”) before becoming a teacher eager to speak up against the country’s caste system and misogynist culture. (“Men had claimed exclusive ownership of Somali poetry, although throughout history women had played a pivotal role by actually composing it,” Yusuf writes.) Each story individually has an instructive tone, but taken together the cycle has a more complex perspective on how people are inspired or damaged by social forces. Lives are lost to “an accumulation of social illnesses,” Mayxaano says, and these plainspoken stories are laments for their consequences.
Informative and direct storytelling from a corner of Africa that’s poorly understood in the West.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946395-07-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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