A unique, powerful voice in African literature.
When Leena Kohli returns home to Kenya after three years in London, she's forced to reckon with the personal and national trauma that forced her abroad.
Verjee’s second novel (In Between Dreams, 2014) explores the nuanced, layered intricacies of racial politics in east Africa beyond black and white, focusing on the tensions between Africans and Indians living in post–British imperialism Kenya. While many Indians have left Kenya in the midst of political upheaval—“most of his friends have taken their families abroad to avoid the possible messy outcome of a rigged election”—Leena’s father, Raj, has decided his family will remain in Kenya and work for the greater good. Raj has groomed Leena's brother, Jai, to follow in the footsteps of his particular brand of idealistic activism, but life in Kenya is too much for Leena. Less than 24 hours after her return, she's assaulted by vandals, and her pleas for help are ignored by the corrupt police until Jai bribes them. Throughout all this, the mystery of the traumatic event that propelled Leena’s absence from Kenya drives the narrative. With her father and brother focused on politics and her entire family ignoring the depth of her pain, Leena finds refuge in a rekindled relationship with a childhood friend. Intertwined with Leena’s narrative is the story of jaded policeman Jeffery Omondi’s Orwellian descent into corruption, until the two storylines eventually come to a climactic head. While at times excessively coy in revealing information, the novel is rich in profound observations of character, psychology, and human nature. Moving seamlessly between present, past, and further past, Verjee creates stories within stories, rounding out her characters by presenting each as the fully-realized hero of his or her own story.
A unique, powerful voice in African literature.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-936-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
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
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