Hunter invokes Joseph Conrad toward the start of this book, underscoring how much this region near the equator has changed...
Matters of the heart overpower a missing person case in a Central African village.
As has been true of generations of African-Americans stung by white racism, Kwame Johnson, a New England–bred black professor of African literature, is both romantic and inquisitive about life in his ancestral homeland. He is given a chance to satisfy his curiosity by taking a post as a cultural officer with the United States Information Service in Kinshasa. The time is the late 1990s, when the Congo was still known as Zaire, in the waning days of Mombuto Sese Seko’s brutal dictatorship. From the moment Kwame arrives in the country, he has the sense, familiar to generations of African-American visitors, of being quite foreign to Africans despite his skin color. (“I am here, he thought, but I am still out of place.”) Just after he arrives, he's sent on a visit to Mbandaka, a remote village where he's supposed to learn the ropes while working with a white USIS officer named Kent Mason—but Mason doesn't show up to meet him at the plane, and no one knows where he's gone. Kwame combs through everything the man left behind; papers, books, letters, photos, even clothing. But he's distracted from whatever implications or intrigue surround Mason’s unexplained absence by the people he meets in Mbandaka: a few white Belgians, including an embittered landowner and his libidinous wife, and, more notably, a Nigerian doctor named Olatubusun Odejimi, who introduces him to the arcane pleasures of hemp and breakfast whiskey—and has many lovers among the locals, including the landowner’s wife. Another of Odejimi’s lady friends is Madame Vandenbroucke, a sultry, enigmatic Congolese once married to and then abandoned by a white European. Kwame finds himself falling in love with Madame Van, to the point of wanting to marry her, despite his being engaged to a wealthy WASP woman back in the U.S. Hunter, who's white, was once a USIS officer assigned to the Congo and an Africa correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor; he's mixed romance and intrigue before in Love in the Time of Apartheid (2016). His dry, straightforward tone doesn’t always serve him well in characterization or in the more erotic interludes. But his book is most rewarding in its shrewd assessments of cross-cultural mores and manners.
Hunter invokes Joseph Conrad toward the start of this book, underscoring how much this region near the equator has changed while still retaining its mystery to outsiders, no matter what color their skins.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57962-516-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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