A long (720 pp.) first novel—partly grand entertainment, partly hobbyhorse—about a century-long battle between the sexes. Told mostly as oral history, it's occasionally garrulous, but it's also full of lore and a voice at times worthy of Eudora Welty. Lucy Marsden, born in 1885 or thereabouts, tells the tale at age 99 from Lane's End Rest Home, and she takes the book's epigraph to heart: "Myth is gossip grown old." In rhythm with Lucy's memory, the narrative meanders between war stories, family conflicts, rest-home instances, and rudimentary feminism. Lucy was the child bride of Captain Willie, a media-stop (oldest Civil War veteran) in modern times. Willie, crazed from the War, never got over the death of Ned, a beautiful boy, so Lucy's marriage chronicles a lifetime of abuse—until she wins a death-struggle and kills a nearly senile but still-cagey Willie. That climax takes a while to reach, however, for Lucy delivers many other richly told stories: Willie's war anecdotes, as well as a more grandiloquent version of the War told to Lucy by a classroom teacher; Willie's mother "Lady" Marsden's story (Yankees bum down her mansion and freed slaves loot it); the epic tale of ex-slave Castalia Marsden, ranging from Africa and slave ships to a present-day kinship with Lucy; the story of Lucy's nine children and of her own growth into liberation and feminism ("Males are frailer and shorter-lived and overly talented at the pride that depresses"); and a host of other tellings, usually in Lucy's gossipy dialect. A Disneyland for Civil War buffs-in a modernist version of Gone with the Wind-that's sometimes tedious but more often panoramic and moving. Either way, it announces the arrival of a genuine talent-one who seems to specialize in excess.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1989
ISBN: 0375726632
Page Count: 737
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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
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