Well intentioned, though the tale—partly of Appalachia, partly of Middle East—loses more strength than it gains through...
A sensitive if uncompelling exploration of cultural alienation: an abandoned son searches for understanding and redemption after his snake-handling father is fatally bitten.
The member of a notorious Appalachian sect who handles venomous snakes and ingests poison during religious services to prove his faith should be an intriguing subject—especially if, like Little Sam Jenkins, the figure also seduces young women, fathers numerous children, and cynically uses his preaching gifts to win fame and sexual favors. Even so, the Iranian-born Nahai (Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, 1999, etc.) adds a second story, this one with Middle Eastern origins. Sunday’s Silence opens when journalist Adam Watkins, stationed in Beirut, learns that Little Sam Adams has been killed by a snake handed to him during a service by a woman named Blue. Little Sam had married Watkins’s grandmother, a coal miner’s widow, then later had had an affair with Clare, her teenaged and sexually precocious daughter, who gave birth to Adam, tried to raise him, finally left him in a local orphanage. Now back in Knoxville, Adam tries to discover more about both Little Sam and the beautiful Blue Kerdi, the wife of an elderly professor. He soon meets her, and the two begin an affair, as Blue tells him her life story. The daughter of Kurds, one Muslim and one Jewish, she was raised as a nomad and married young in Iran to a professor, a nonpracticing Jew. In Knoxville, she joined Sam’s sect because the members made her feel welcome. As Adam learns about his family’s hard life and recalls his own years in the orphanage, he also hears why Blue killed Little Sam. And when the professor is found dead, with Blue is suspected of poisoning him, Adam realizes he must stay and fight.
Well intentioned, though the tale—partly of Appalachia, partly of Middle East—loses more strength than it gains through being double-stranded.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100627-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Widely published illustrator and comic-strip artist Kuper does more than merely provide pictures for nine of Kafka's narratives. He edits the text sharply, and concentrates various descriptions into his singular scratchboard drawings. The result is unevensome pieces nicely capture Kafka's cityscapes in angular designs reminiscent of ``The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.'' Others update the time and place, an idea that works particularly well in ``The Trees,'' a striking tale of indifference to the homeless, with menacing images of police brutality. The project, on the whole, seems a bit hastily conceived; each story begins with a powerful splash page that defies conventional graphic panel design, but then the stories often peter out, with images less and less fully imagined. Hand-lettering would also have improved the visual impact of these black and white texts. Nevertheless, a worthy companion volume to R. Crumb's recent Introducing Kafka.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56163-125-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A prominent critic of Chicano literature tries his hand at a novela conventional romance that tarts itself up as a postmodern study in obsession and perspective. Bruce-Novoa's debut has the makings of a modest, sociologically interesting coming-of-age narrative: the story of an assimilated Mexican-American boy in Los Angeles during the '50s and '60s. Instead, the author overreaches and turns his protagonist's first love into a goddess of mythic proportions. She's the ``American Dream,'' the blond ideal, a madonna too good to defile. Later, when Paul Valencia becomes Paul Valence, a successful screenwriter, he even claims to have inspired George Lucas's unattainable blond driving a convertible in American Graffiti. And that's just a small indication of where this ambitious novel goes wrong. The first half of the story nicely recounts the innocence and frustrations of Catholic schoolboysthe sports, the psycho nuns and the nurturing ones, and, of course, the early awareness of girls. Paul's great love is one Ann Marisse, a blond Italian- American from a large and friendly family. Despite some furtive kisses and gropings, Paul saves his pent-up sexuality for a series of less perfect girls until Ann Marisse finally gets wind of his other life and they eventually split. The novel abruptly shifts to many years later, with Paul realizing that all his film work derives from the same primal scene: his first look at Ann Marisse. Though married to a famous European actress, Paul still swoons for his ideal woman, now married to a childhood enemy. He finally returns from his long European exile to create his dreamscape in Carmel, though it's not clear whom he's enjoying it with at the self-consciously poetic end. A meta-level overlaycomplete with footnotes and commentaryweighs too heavily on an otherwise amiable and nostalgic narrative.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55885-078-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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