A persuasive, witty exploration of a tough and unconventional young woman—and a consistently lively account of the...
White South African writer Rose-Innes makes her American debut with a nimble, intriguing novel about a second-generation Cape Town exterminator—er, ethical pest-removal specialist.
As founder/proprietor of Painless Pest Relocations, Katya Grubbs—accompanied by her teenage nephew, Toby—spends her days as a kind of interspecies border-control officer, watching for encroaching animals that stray from "their" territory into the luxury homes and groomed, gated developments of the city. She traps and then offloads a wide variety of unwanted—"unloved and unlovely"—critters: caterpillars, frogs, snakes, roaches, mongooses, and more. Early on in the novel, she's hired to remove a mysterious plague of mud-swarming beetles from Nineveh, a swanky coastal development, reclaimed from wetlands, that is languishing in a state of near completion until the "goggas" can be dispatched. Her boss is a shady but colorful Afrikaans developer named Brand, who informs her that she' s replacing an exterminator with whom he had a falling-out—Katya's own estranged father, Len, who, colorful and shady himself, bears a certain resemblance to her employer. To gauge the extent of the infestation, Katya needs to spend a few days at Nineveh, and her investigations there reveal little by way of animal interlopers, initially—she's told the beetles show up after a rain, and the weather's been dry—but in the meantime she makes some discoveries about the development, which appears to be disappearing fixture by fixture, tile by tile, despite the presence of on-site security; a scavenger economy thrives in the seething-with-life wetlands just beyond the walls. And then, not quite to Katya's surprise, Len—another specimen out of place, it would seem—shows up.
A persuasive, witty exploration of a tough and unconventional young woman—and a consistently lively account of the entanglements of cultural politics, class, and architecture in contemporary South Africa.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-97-2
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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