THE CAGE

Name: THE CAGE
Author: Lloyd Jones
ISBN: 978-1925603-22-4

by Lloyd Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2019

An eloquent microcosm of the existence endured by many of the world’s 68.5 million displaced persons, refugees, and asylum...

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A tale of two caged men that provides an affecting fable for the plight of refugees.

The poorly clothed strangers arrive in an unnamed town and are given a room in a hotel. They’ve come from far away but decline to give their names, addresses, or the reason for their travels, which soon emerges as flight from some cataclysm. When pressed, the strangers respond symbolically, making from fencing wire a sculpture like a large, crude tea-strainer, which “represents [their] conundrum”: They are people who cannot speak of a past they have fled. Two townsmen scale up the creation, building a graphic irony that will confine the strangers until they explain their catastrophe, which is deemed important to the town’s well-being. In this cage they are exposed to the elements, fed through a hole, cleaned with a hose, and forced to eliminate in situ. The foul smell permeates the narrative. A committee forms to oversee them and asks a young man, the first-person narrator, to deliver weekly reports on their behavior. He’s eager, callow, not without empathy—a plausible stand-in for many readers. For the New Zealand–born Jones (A History of Silence, 2013, etc.), the strangers’ reticence serves the nonspecific nature of fable, but there’s an implication that they know from experience that their answers won’t satisfy their inquisitors. Similarly, they often ask about “the woman from the agency,” a Godot-like figure who also suggests this isn’t their first run-in with the elusive totems of bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the narrator gets fleshed out more than the committee members, with their smug justifications and group shrugs. He comes to reflect another conundrum, that of the well-meaning observer who seems to grow in awareness, even to care, yet still risks little to relieve abject conditions.

An eloquent microcosm of the existence endured by many of the world’s 68.5 million displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers, as recently counted by the United Nations.

Pub Date: April 9, 2019

ISBN: 978-1925603-22-4

Page Count: 271

Publisher: Text

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by Chinua Achebe

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by Chinua Achebe

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by Chinua Achebe

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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.