Lackluster effort from a talented young author.
Newly translated work by the author of Beauty Is a Wound (2015).
The story begins with the grisly murder of Anwar Sadat—not the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 but, rather, a lazy and lascivious artist living in a small town on the Indian Ocean. The cause of death is no mystery: a young man named Margio is clearly guilty. What no one can figure out, though, is the boy’s motive. Nor can they explain why Margio dispatched Anwar Sadat by ripping out the man’s throat with his teeth. What nobody knows is that Margio wasn’t quite himself when he attacked Anwar Sadat; Margio was, instead, possessed by a white tiger. This is the second of Kurniawan’s novels to be published this year, and it shares a number of similarities with its predecessor. The first and most obvious is the porous boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Another is the way in which the author borrows formal elements from folklore and oral tradition. But, where Beauty Is a Wound is sprawling and disorderly, this novel is succinct and disciplined. This evolution in style doesn’t work to the book’s benefit, though. The narrator’s voice is gossipy and close to the action—often the case in folklore—but the characters are almost never allowed to speak for themselves. And, although the story begins in medias res, the bulk of the book is a retrospective account of events leading up to the murder. Both stylistic choices keep the reader from getting close to Margio, Anwar Sadat, and their tragically intertwined families. And Kurniawan’s commitment to economy means that potentially fascinating episodes—like Margio’s decision to join the circus in order to learn from the tiger tamers—are reduced to a sentence or two. The readers most likely to be disappointed are those intrigued by the paranormal creature promised by the title: tiger sightings are few and far between.
Lackluster effort from a talented young author.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 9781781688595
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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