A rich collection full of work of accomplishment and great promise alike.
Annual installment of the prize volume honoring short stories by African writers.
Established in 2000, the Caine Prize recognizes short stories of distinction published by African writers, which is to say, a native or citizen of an African nation or someone who has a parent of African birth or nationality. The present volume includes the five stories shortlisted for the prize, three of them by Nigerian writers this year, as well as a dozen stories by developing writers written at the Caine Prize Writers' Workshop. Several pieces speak to the experience of African immigrants in the U.S. The story “Departure,” by the Cameroonian writer Nsah Mala, is a case in point, one that opens on a note of foreboding: “It wasn’t the first night sleep had divorced her.” Nangeh has visions, one of which comes to her as she drops a bucket into a well: She is returning on a plane from America, with piles of cash and “big suitcases of American products.” Indeed, she’s won a green card lottery, but now she needs the money to get there. Alas, says the District Officer, whom she approaches for help, the only way she’ll get there is to marry his son—and never mind the fact that Nangeh is already married. It’s a story that does not end well, for all the promise of a new world. Just so, Rwandan writer Caroline Numuhire recounts the travails of a young woman who finds herself, improbably, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, caught up in just such a web. She frees herself, returning home alone: “Had it been beauty, intelligence, money, charm or any other woman, it might have been a battle I could have won. But my rival’s name was America." Dreams abound in this collection, as does some wonderful poetry, as when Ethiopian writer Heran Abate writes: “The clouds are pink and orange in a way that Mititi thinks is magical. She points up to them and starts blowing air in their direction as if to move them along faster.”
A rich collection full of work of accomplishment and great promise alike.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62371-970-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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