Rouaud's second novel, filled with nostalgia and turgid prose, fails to live up to the promise of his Prix Goncourtwinning debut (Fields of Glory, 1992). In this slim volume, which reads less like a novel and more like a memoir, the narrator tries to nail down his elusive, demigod father who died suddenly at the age of 41. From the perspective of an adult, the narrator sifts through his childhood memories of the few moments he spent with this traveling salesman in their hometown of Random in the Loire Valley, as well as the history of his father's work with the Resistance during WW II. These moments made a great impression on the boy, who obviously longed for a stronger paternal presence, and the narrator lengthily describes each remembrance so as not to miss a hint of meaning in the little he knows of his father: the collection of postcards his father sent from every town he stayed in and what he wrote on the back; the educational wall charts his father sold, one with a cutaway diagram of the body that lacked genitalia and another with a modestly posed Lady Godiva; how his father organized the cleanup of every dish, glass, shelf, and wall in the family's porcelain shop after a forgotten oil lamp covered the room with a layer of soot. Sometimes the narrator does find answers to the question ``Who was my father?'' in these details: He was a take-charge kind of guy who could rally people to scrub spotless a store that seemed hopelessly dirty; or he was a funny guy who wrote ``How many cows can you count on this postcard?'' when there wasn't even one. But too often, the details read like the shopping list of an adult obsessed with an enigma. Tender and sweet if you can slosh through the excess.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-265-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
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
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