The Information meets While England Sleeps? Not exactlybut this sly fable manages to combine the scandals surrounding both of those wildly disparate novels. For 35 years, publisher Edward Destry has watched his beautiful, heartless friend Nicolas Fabry, a Martin Amislike literary success born under an unaccountably lucky star, leave him further and further in the dust. Nicolas tossed off the juvenilia his friend published in his literary magazine (ending Destry's friendship with his coeditors), seduced and abandoned the women Destry was too tongue-tied to try his luck with, and churned out the increasingly successful novels Destry was content to publish. But the revelation that Nicolas's latest novel, which has won the Goncourt Prize, is based on the real-life suicide of one of Nicolas's first conquests, Destry's great lost love, spurs Destry to a diabolical revenge that Stephen Spender might well envy. If Nicolas can't be punished for making fiction out of the spent lives of his old friends, Destry resolves, then he'll be punished for making fiction out of somebody else's fiction. So Destry sets out to forge a prewar novel that Nicolas can be sued (by somebody else with a grudge against Nicolas, of courseplenty of them around) for plagiarizing. Alternately hugging himself for his ingenuity and sweating lest he get caught on some technicality he's forgotten, Destry lays his trap with all the dedicated envy anybody's ever felt for an unjustly successful writer and waits to see how it'll all come out. He won't be disappointedeven though he's right in worrying that he can't have thought of everything. Swiss writer Fiechter's suave, malicious first novel has already won the Grand Prize for Detective Fiction in France. Wonder what nefarious tale lies underneath that prize?
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-55970-285-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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