Undeniable horror, unremarkable writing.
A novelist (Dreams of the Kalahari, 1981, not reviewed) recalls the difficulties of her African girlhood, including a series of brutal rapes by her father, beginning when she was six.
Slaughter offers a stark account of her life in Africa with a dour, brutal father and manic mother. Her father, a British foreign-service officer who was around for the fall of the Raj in India, moves thereafter to Africa, where he accepts one dreary posting after another at the time that many countries on the continent were emerging from generations of colonial control. Slaughter begins with her early childhood on the journey from England to Africa and ends with her return a dozen or so years later. In between, she documents all sorts of unpleasantness(from having to drink her own urine (a punishment for wetting herself at school), to seeing her father’s testicles dangle outside his shorts, to hearing of children eaten by crocodiles, to plotting (and very nearly executing) the murder of her father. “I should have known that he’d be unkillable,” she sighs. She eventually goes off to boarding school, where she shocks the nuns with her intransigence and ignorance, falls in love with a fellow student named Virginia (they become fast friends and do not, Slaughter declares, become physically intimate), and eventually(with the older Virginia as her mentor(begins to gain some control of her life. What Slaughter does not take control of here is her language. At even the most poignant moments, she cannot resist the fatal allure of cliché (people go ballistic, have steady streams of conversation, and wash their hands of each other) and at other times she cannot manage more than the banal: “Only in poetry,” she writes, “could I find a mirror for the innermost life of the mind.” She asserts that she did not remember the rapes until ten years ago, when shards of memories began to slice at her.
Undeniable horror, unremarkable writing.Pub Date: May 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41397-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
