Many of Volodine’s writers inhabit a “post-exotic” world, in which they’re obligated to remember the atrocities and horrors...
A loosely concatenated series of seven stories, all focusing on writers in various and cunning guises.
The opening tale introduces Mathias Olbane, a suicidal writer and former inmate at a penitentiary now plagued with oncoglyphosis, a rare illness whose manifestation is a “retraction of the scalp,” a condition that torments him. Convicted of being a member of a terrorist organization, despite his emphatic denials, Olbane served 26 years—and came out with plenty of material. “Begin-ing” plunges us into a Kafkaesque world in which a man is being tormented into making a confession about almost anything—“that he has contacts with parallel universes, with aliens, that since his birth he has been a double agent"—although he professes that his mind is completely empty. Bruno and Greta, his incredulous interlocutors, turn out to be sadistic, murderous and insane. “Acknowledgments,” one of the few stories with a lighter tone, is in fact a delicious sendup of a writer’s elaborate appreciation for all the help he received in completing his novel, but also included is a list of those who did not aid the creative process, those whose “malicious critiques, mean-spirited little reviews, and unpardonable silences carried substantial weight towards my books’ lack of success.” In the futuristic “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev,” the narrator explores an author whose career spans a period from 2017 to 2053 and whose periodic silences raise cryptic issues about creativity.
Many of Volodine’s writers inhabit a “post-exotic” world, in which they’re obligated to remember the atrocities and horrors of the 20th century—and to serve as repositories of a dark cultural memory.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62897-040-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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