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STILL WATERS IN NIGER

Name: STILL WATERS IN NIGER
Author: Kathleen Hill
ISBN: 0-8101-5089-1

by Kathleen Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1999

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A woman restores her frayed relationship with an adult daughter, in a story that’s more a meditation on motherhood and place (in this case Africa) than a narrative-centered tale. The nameless narrator, a middle-aged Irish-American woman, returns to Niger, where her eldest daughter Zara is working at a medical center in the provincial town of Matamaye. It lies near Zinder, the village the narrator lived in 17 years before with her three children and husband, who was then working on his Ph.D. dissertation. Both towns are on the edge of the desert; sandstorms are common, water scarce, and crops scanty. In addition, malnutrition is endemic, beggars with horrible deformities are numerous, and many of the children Zara cares for are dying of hunger. As the narrator accompanies Zara on her rounds, meeting her daughter’s women friends, she is preoccupied with her failure to have done more to help when she lived in Zinder, where something happened that marred her relationship with her daughter. And in luminous if sometimes overwrought prose she recalls her own often difficult relationship with her mother and her confused emotions upon learning that she was pregnant with Zara. But as she meets African women and their daughters, she realizes that they are bound by ties that both strain and strengthen their relationships. In an anticlimactic, even trite revelation, the narrator learns why Zara felt that her mother failed her on her sixth birthday in Zinder. Rifts healed, insights gained, and a symbolic gift made, she is then ready to leave both Zara and Zinder. First-novelist Hill, who once lived in Africa herself, offers some beautiful evocations of place and people but not enough, sadly, to give this thin tale life.

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-8101-5089-1

Page Count: 207

Publisher: Northwestern Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.