by Joe Dunthorne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2012
A fresh perspective on modern culture, peppered with colorful dialogue that keeps the story afloat.
The consequences of being raised by hippie parents in a commune begin to loom large for two siblings.
Deservedly lauded for his debut novel and its subsequent indie-film adaptation, Dunthorne (Submarine, 2008) loses some traction but gains some writing chops with his sophomore outing. The book is set at Blaen-y-Llyn, a commune in south Wales whose experiment in self-sufficiency is beginning to fray at the edges after 20 years of isolation. The locals (and some of the residents) call it The Rave House, following a particularly noisy birthday party for teenager Kate. After years of exposure to nudity, drugs, goats and self-indulgence, Kate has decided to rebel in the most divisive way she can think up: dating a meat-headed local boy named Geraint and indulging in the banal amenities of suburban life outside the commune. At the heart of her rebellion is the growing tension between her parents: Don, the community’s bearded founder in love with his own skewed ideology, and Freya, a long-suffering spouse whose growing sense of discontent is throwing Blaen-y-Llyn into disarray. A number of other odd characters fill out the ensemble, from a dope-addled romantic smitten with another member of the community to a former ad man who appears to be quietly documenting the community’s demise for his own selfish purposes. The book’s beating heart is Kate’s brother Albert, a 12-year-old whose burgeoning sexuality, scalding intellect and off-kilter sense of humor put him at odds with everyone around him. The best scenes are those that put Albert and his beloved sister at odds. “Where were Mum and Dad while you were being brainwashed?” asks Albert. “I wash my own brain,” Kate retorts. While it lacks the self-awareness and cohesion of Submarine, this novel holds up admirably as a funny if meandering portrait of a postmodern family whose collapse is as meaningful as their coming together.
A fresh perspective on modern culture, peppered with colorful dialogue that keeps the story afloat.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6684-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
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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