Minor work from a major writer.
An ill-fated love affair symbolizes the chaos of contemporary Balkan politics in the latest novel from the acclaimed Albanian author (The Ghost Rider, 2010, etc.) who was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Literature in 2005.
It begins as what seems to be a political thriller, in the immediate aftermath of a fatal taxicab accident on the Vienna Autobahn. Separate investigations are conducted by the governments of Albania and Serbia, as the two passengers killed were Albanians (and, as hastily gathered documentary evidence suggests, lovers who met frequently over a span of 12 years). The surviving cabdriver confesses he might have been distracted by catching sight of the couple “trying to kiss.” But it’s apparent that much more intimacy than that was shared by Besfort Y., a government operative employed by the Council of Europe and somehow involved with war-crimes trials then proceeding at The Hague, and his putative mistress Rovena, an intern at the Albanian Archaeological Institute. Summaries of investigative reports are juxtaposed with an unidentified “researcher’s” imagined history of the couple’s unequal relationship, as evidence implies a pattern of dominance and submission enacted by the sometimes cruel Besfort and the essentially passive Rovena. The enigma remains modestly intriguing throughout, yet the novel is anything but a thriller. Neither character, as seen in retrospective (and often flawed) remembrance and in speculation, is given enough life—or even specificity of detail—to elicit much reader interest; it’s as if we’re invited to empathize with chess pieces. The novel comes alive, fitfully, only when Kadare ingeniously connects the couple’s deathward progression with motifs from indigenous history and folklore (a device that is always one of the author’s greatest strengths).
Minor work from a major writer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2995-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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