A bulky, at times forbiddingly dour ground-level journey into Soviet-era deceits.
An epic study of one Bulgarian village’s travails during World War II and under Communist rule.
First published in 1986, Petrov’s novel circles around a group of men who, on Christmas Eve 1965, leave a bar to participate in a wolf hunt in a blizzard. The men have known each other for years and generally have reasons to resent each other, so the mix of bad weather, alcohol, and rifles is an ominous combination. But though the excursion has explosive and tragic consequences, Petrov works at a low boil, moving slowly (sometimes very slowly) through the men’s pasts. One has his wedding day ruined when one of the attendees publicly reveals that the bride is not a virgin; others are farmers strong-armed into taking part in a Soviet cooperative that mainly impoverishes them; a tubercular young man struggles to defend the honor of his brother-in-law and father-in-law, who both stand accused of treason. Translator Rodel keeps the prose clear and colloquial, but the avalanche of details about various families and their histories, delivered in lengthy paragraphs, is often dry. However, a central section centered on Ivan, the village artist and troublemaker, has a welcome liveliness: his interference in the marriage of a local couple blends the romance and danger of a love triangle with the political and financial struggles of getting ahead under communism. (The implication being that life under the co-op's strictures is a kind of cuckolding too.) Like most critiques of communism, the mood throughout the novel is melancholy, and the plot is rife with loss and heartbreak. “Everywhere there were wars, poverty and misery, treachery and lies, violence and slavery, joy and happiness,” one narrator intones near the end, which also captures the ratio of gloom to sunshine contained within.
A bulky, at times forbiddingly dour ground-level journey into Soviet-era deceits.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-914671-70-1
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A first English translation of a 1989 Hungarian novel, in which the arrival of a traveling circus in a nondescript village arouses local curiosity, paranoia, and terror and ends in a kind of communal madness. Like the work of Austrian ur-pessimist Thomas Bernhard (which may have influenced it), Krasznahorkai’s darkly funny parable is presented in chapters of unbroken long paragraphs, and attains both a hurtling momentum and a pleasing complexity in the presentation of its passionately interconnected characters—the most memorable being the Valkyrie-like hausfrauen Mrs. Eszter and Mrs. Plauf, the former’s estranged husband (a music teacher who tries and fails to remain aloof from his neighbors’ fear of everything new and different), and the latter’s son Valuska, a young idealist whose “awakening” is gloomily foreordained. Not an easy read, but ingeniously composed and fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-7043-8009-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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