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TEHANO

Name: TEHANO
Author: Allen Wier
ISBN: 0-87074-506-9

by Allen Wier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2006

A leisurely, credible recreation of the Lone Star past.

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A Texas-sized novel of the way west-by-southwest.

When we first meet Gideon Jones, Portis Goar and Knobby Cotton, we’re on the outskirts of Cormac McCarthy country: After all, Knobby has just shot Portis—better known as Eye, though Eye Goar is probably not meant to call Young Frankenstein to mind—plumb through the chest, and Jones, “the itinerant drummer of lightning rods, self-taught undertaker, and fledgling journalist” is busily packing cedar sap into the wound to stop the bleeding. We never quite enter the territory, though. Wier’s language is less exacting and less exalted than McCarthy’s, and though it has something in common with that of Blood Meridian, the action is deliberate and sometimes mannered, without McCarthy’s spasms of violence. Weir (Writing/Univ. of Tenn., Knoxville) nods at other books, especially Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, in this ambitious novel of the troubled settling of Texas, once populated by characters with names such as Melon Breasts Woman and White Rump. There are many ghosts and half-buried skulls about this multicultural place, where Yankees mingle with Rebels and blacks and Comanches and Germans and various mixes of the aforesaid, the blend of people who would come to be called Tejanos. Like soldiering for the ill-fated Confederacy, as one character observes, Wier’s narrative strands often “don’t turn out the way you expected,” notably in the matter of a poor fellow named Alexander Wesley, who carries his amputated arm with him and pays a steep price for his devotion to his former limb. There are surprises and solid payoffs in the twisting plotline, which weaves the stories of many characters, the luckiest of whom make it through in one piece and alive to do the business of settling the West—until, that is, Wier brings this long, winding tale to a close and bumps off even the most likable of them.

A leisurely, credible recreation of the Lone Star past.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-87074-506-9

Page Count: 736

Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.