This may be Ball’s most self-contained work, but it’s also one of his most fragile and one that may not hold up under...
A man and a woman are locked in a strange therapeutic cycle in this speculative fiction by literary experimentalist Ball (Silence Once Begun, 2014, etc.)
Though he often protests that he doesn’t want his books to be considered “trickery,” Ball once again uses a fair amount of deception, smoke, and mirrors to draw readers into his poetically nimble but characteristically peculiar story. He borrows a bit of science fiction’s flexible plausibility and a few twists from the likes of M. Night Shyamalan and sets his story in a remote village that wouldn’t be out of place on AMC’s recent remake of The Prisoner. A man awakens in a Victorian house in “Gentlest Village D4.” He has no memory, not even of his name—the novel calls him “Claimant.” A woman lives in the house; she is “the examiner,” who tells him that he was very sick and nearly died. Over the course of the first section, the examiner teaches the claimant about all manner of things and records his troubling dreams. Eventually, the claimant and the examiner take on names, but once the cycle restarts and they move to a new village, they take on different names, and the claimant keeps encountering a woman in the village who stirs unfamiliar but persistent feelings in him. Ball is playing with a lot of conceptual territory here, contemplating memory, identity, and isolation, among other themes. The novel eventually pulls back the curtain on “the Process of Villages,” this strange therapeutic transformation invented to allow men to start over completely with different identities. There are times it feels rushed between the spare, meticulous play going on between the claimant and the examiner and other breathless sections with unbroken waves of narrative exposition—the shift in tones can be jarring.
This may be Ball’s most self-contained work, but it’s also one of his most fragile and one that may not hold up under focused scrutiny by a wider audience.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87012-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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
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