A sweetly pleasing though scarcely satisfying narrative.
Canadian den Hartog’s first novel comes after the American publication of her second (The Perpetual Ending, p. 8) and is again about independent sisters and their pretty but vapid mother bereft of husband.
In lovely if lightweight prose, den Hartog introduces Hannah and Vivian in their own voices as they make their way back to their small hometown three hours from Ottawa. It’s the eve of their mother Darlene’s second marriage to the local shoe-store owner. Long-haired and eternally youthful, Darlene provides a kind of cotton-candy center to the family’s thread of earnest anecdotes, beginning with first husband Mick’s having walked out when the girls were nearly adolescent. A free spirit and lover of nature, Mick was sorely missed by his two daughters and their mother, who never quite got over his departure, though her chronic philandering couldn’t bring him back, either. Still, now, living close by are Darlene’s sister, Angie, solicitous and often spitefully envious, and her ethereal only daughter Wren, born with webbed feet. Den Hartog works by long-winded flashbacks, pursuing over the years the growing into womanhood of the two sisters who are never quite right for the town and can’t wait to leave. Along the way are Darlene’s intermittent new boyfriends (fleshy scientist Uncle Tim, for example, whom the girls hate) and Mick’s untimely death, while Wren, considered a kind of freak, tries to find friendship in the Brownies. Finally, Darlene’s wedding day arrives, signaled by a switch to the present tense, though the stream-of-consciousness remains constant—as if Vivian and Hannah had never grown up and experienced a life of their own. If the point of the story is to get at the reason behind Darlene and Mick’s breakup, it’s a flimsy teaser. While there’s considerable detail throughout, den Hartog’s tidy prose and fleeting surfaces don’t let the reader glean a visceral sense of these characters’ lives.
A sweetly pleasing though scarcely satisfying narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-61-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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