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MALVA

Name: MALVA
Author: Hagar Peeters
ISBN: 978-0-9997544-0-5

by Hagar Peeters ; translated by Vivien D. Glass ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018

An evocative portrait of a lost girl demanding agency even in the face of death itself.

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The abandoned daughter of a famous poet finds her voice beyond the grave.

This phantasmagoric novel by the celebrated Dutch poet Peeters (Maturity, 2011, etc.) is a strange experience, poetic in word and verse but somewhat hesitant about finding its point. Our narrator is Malva Marina Trinidad del Carmen Reyes, Malvie to her friends. Except the real-life Malva never found her voice; the only child of the legendary poet-diplomat and politician Pablo Neruda was born in 1934 with a severe disability caused by hydrocephalus and died in 1943. Not a single line of Neruda’s work is devoted to the child. Here, she writes her story herself through Peeters, able to pass back and forth through time and space. “Oh Hagar, you’ll find out when your time comes: the hereafter is all about going over old ground,” she confesses. Her “afterparty of the dead" is a colorful one, populated by characters that include Oskar Matzerath, “the droll dwarf with the tin drum from the novel by Günter Grass,” as well as James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, and Arthur Miller’s son, Daniel, who had Down syndrome and who thinks Malva is trying to posthumously earn her father’s love. She also bonds, in a way, with Socrates (a father figure of sorts) and with the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, whom Malva secretly aspires to make her grandmother. Stylistically flamboyant prose may overshadow a sadly common theme as both Malva and Peeters explore what it means for a child to be abandoned by a parent. There is some resonance in making reparations for this long-lost daughter. While there’s not much narrative substance here, Malva’s voice is intriguing, having evolved beyond revenge or anger into a deeper acceptance.

An evocative portrait of a lost girl demanding agency even in the face of death itself.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-9997544-0-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.