An admirable if challenging reworking of the overworked themes of war-hero tales.
A war hero delivers a final, mournful series of remembrances just as his memories begin to scatter.
The title of this striking and slippery late novel by Tabucchi (Time Ages in a Hurry, 2015, etc.) gives away the ending, but even so the somber opening pages leave little doubt to the story’s trajectory. Tristano is at the end of his life, one leg ravaged with gangrene, and he’s summoned a writer who’s reimagined his life in a novel to set the record straight. The novel depicted Tristano’s moment of heroism during World War II—as an Italian soldier stationed in Greece, he killed a Nazi soldier who murdered an innocent woman and child, then hid in the mountains with Greek partisans. Tabucchi has his protagonist struggle to recall his story, thinking of the women he loved, questioning his heroism, and bemoaning the infirmity of the truth. “Life isn’t arranged in alphabetical order,” he laments, and to echo that point, Tabucchi’s tale is digressive and sometimes frustratingly abstract. But if the overall narrative is splintered, Tristano’s philosophizing is oak-solid, engaging, and often black-humored. He riffs often on the flexibility of history and who gets to write it, the cruelty of war and the atomic bomb, selective memory, mental illness, and betrayal. “At times it’s so hard to tell the difference between cruelty and justice…killing…or murdering,” he intones as he shades toward a late confession. The incompleteness of the story, its distance from objective truth, is part of Tabucchi’s narrative strategy, prompting the reader to consider what kind of information we need to assign somebody the title of hero. Tristano is a great admirer of Borges, and this book evokes his wordplay as well as his eagerness to manipulate time and storytelling like taffy.
An admirable if challenging reworking of the overworked themes of war-hero tales.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-914671-24-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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