A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.
Anti-apartheid author Brink (Devil's Valley, 1999, etc.) has adapted to the new dispensation with stylistically experimental novels. But his latest, except for an awkward trace of magical realism, more conventionally details the painful lessons an old man learns when he falls in love.
Because South Africa is still evolving, current politics are as much a part of the story as ever, but the mood is more somber. Services are breaking down, corruption is rising, and violent crimes are commonplace. In this increasingly menacing situation, where things seems to be falling apart, the protagonist and narrator, 65-year-old widower Ruben Olivier, recounts how the young, beautiful, untrustworthy Tessa Butler comes to be his lodger. His home is built on the 18th-century foundations of a house where a Malay slave, Antje of Bengal, murdered her master's wife. Antje, who was executed thereafter, now roams the house meddling in matters of the heart, though her story, suggesting clumsy parallels to the past, is more intrusive than instructive. After a neighbor is brutally murdered and Ruben suffers a heart attack, his sons insist that he move. They're reassured, however, when Tessa joins him. Ruben, a reclusive librarian whose job was given to a hero of the Struggle, has been mourning his wife, the baby she miscarried, and their subsequent estrangement, but is immediately infatuated with Tessa. Fighting his desires and his jealousy—Tessa has multiple lovers and soon needs an abortion—he eventually helps the family's longtime housekeeper Magrieta find a house after a gang burns her old home down, witnesses thugs sexually assaulting Tessa, and learns more about himself. In time, Tessa, more cliché than character, helps Ruben understand how his reluctance to fight led to a breakdown in his marriage and shaped his past.
A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100654-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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