Imperfect, but one of the best introductions to non-Western writers there is.
Wide-ranging, politically charged collection of 27 narratives from around the globe.
This collection opens with an astonishing fact: “50 percent of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 percent are translated into English.” In conjunction with the well-known ignorance of most Americans about global politics—or even global geography—that statistic is reason enough for this absorbing book. Composed of poems, short stories and excerpts from novels, the anthology gathers the work of writers from Iran, India, China, Korea, Romania, Iraq and Palestine, among others. Each text is introduced by a writer more likely to be known to a U.S. audience, including a handful of relatively well-known ones like Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Safran Foer, but many more by internationally acclaimed writers like the Nobelists Naguib Mahfouz and Günter Grass. And while this is a rich and impressive anthology, it is also uneven. This is less the fault of the primary text than of the introductions. Many of them strain to describe the qualities of the writer they introduce, lingering over images and themes in abstract, self-involved language. Some show a real flair for identifying the cultural and historical resonance of the writer they’re presenting; those who do this well (Wole Soyinka, for example) drop the reader right into the center of the narrative. The pieces themselves are all gems. Of special note: the wrenching work of Chinese writer Ma Jian; the beautiful prose of Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma; and the acute social eye of Iranian writer Goli Taraghi.
Imperfect, but one of the best introductions to non-Western writers there is.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-7975-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
