In the darkness, which precedes sight or place or name, man and calf waited." The man is waiting for the calf, the calf is waiting to be born, and the reader waits throughout these short tales and poems of peasant life for the promised sociological insight. Pig Earth is the first of three projected volumes on the transition from the peasant way of life to the metropolis, and Berger (G, A Seventh Man) somehow sees these tales as parables to which he adds a broad but cursory historical afterword. Yet style and story are too lean to support the socio-historical baggage, and so ultimately we are left with stories—most of them with a Marxist tendency to glorify the noble peasant—of cows being butchered and goats mated, of mysteriously-knowing dwarf girls and grandfathers. A man's refusal to accept mechanization of the farm is defended by his insistence that "Working is a way of preserving the knowledge my sons are losing. . . . Without that knowledge, I am nothing"; a country gift is mocked in Paris by other, more sophisticated, servants: "The cook told her to go back to her goat shit. It was the first time Catherine heard the word peasant used as an insult." In a poem titled "Potatoes" even this dowdy peasant staple gains a certain nobility: "During the snow/ heaped in cellars/they gravely offer/ body to the soup." Though Berger disavows any attempt to romanticize ("As soon as one accepts that peasants are a class of survivors. . . any idealization of their way of life becomes impossible"), we find here only the sketchiest view of peasant life. Better look to the historians (Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Eric Hobsbawm & George Rude, Captain Swing; Eric Wolf, Peasants) for the sum and substance of peasant life, and its role in major historical developments. Peas and porridge, but no pie.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1980
ISBN: 0679737154
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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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