A powerful contribution to the literature of the Rwandan genocide.
Four years after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a long-exiled high school history teacher returns home to write a play about what happened, unaware of his father’s role in the atrocity.
In 1998, ten African writers visited Rwanda to observe and write about the aftermath of the genocide, in which members of the Hutu majority massacred hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, mostly of Tutsi ethnicity. Among the literature that came out of that experience is Diop’s (Kaveena, 2016, etc.) novel, originally published in 2000. Divided into four parts, the book alternates between fictionalized first-person accounts of the genocide and the story of Cornelius Uvimana, who fled the country years before and returns believing his only surviving family member is a beloved uncle. After arriving, however, he learns a horrifying truth: his father, a Hutu who Cornelius thought was killed for criticizing the government in the past, was secretly responsible for organizing a massacre at a technical school in Murambi, where Cornelius was born, and is actually still alive. Among the 50,000 to 60,000 murdered were Cornelius’ Tutsi mother and siblings; his father, meanwhile, has fled Rwanda. Soon Cornelius is back in Murambi, trying to come to terms with the fact that he is “the son of a monster.” Diop is equally effective at illuminating the political and the personal. Though never didactic, he manages to cover everything from the role of the French government to the decadeslong history of Hutus murdering Tutsis. Meanwhile, readers may well find the harrowing first-person stories—told by everyone from victims to Cornelius’ father—difficult to shake. Most effectively rendered is Cornelius himself, whose struggle to deal with the reality of his father’s actions is as moving as it is complex. As one character tells him: “after a genocide, the real problem is not the victims but the executioners.”
A powerful contribution to the literature of the Rwandan genocide.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-02342-1
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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