These sketches of life in the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan mark the debut of the 80-year-old Pakistani author.
A timid young couple seeks shelter at a desolate military outpost. They are lovers; the camel herder has stolen away with his master’s wife. She gives birth to their son. Five years pass. The avengers track them down. The herder shoots his wife before he is stoned to death; the love child is spared. This opening episode has the timeless quality of a fable; unfortunately, nothing that follows matches it. Nor does the child serve as a link. He will be 12 before he is even given a name: Tor Baz, meaning black falcon. Later he will make occasional peek-a-boo appearances as an informer, a mountain guide and a trader at a slave market, but he’s far from being a developed character. The only links are the landscape (harsh, mountainous, forbidding) and the reflection of tribal customs. Often it is the documentary rather than the narrative details that linger in the mind. Take the Kharots, nomadic herders who move back and forth across the border according to the seasons. By 1958 the Brits have gone and the two states are demanding travel documents, but these illiterate herders have lived free of paperwork. They try outwitting the border guards but are eventually mowed down by machine guns. It’s a massacre, but a perfunctory one. Ahmad has big trouble with endings. There’s a kidnapping episode. It’s interesting to learn who make the best targets: “schoolteachers, doctors and street cleaners.” There’s a lot of talk but no narrative momentum, and suddenly it’s a done deal: Captives are exchanged for ransom money, smiles all around. Fascinating material that’s badly in need of artistic shaping.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-827-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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