As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of...
A wide-ranging portrait of Soviet and pre-Soviet society and history as seen by an elderly matriarch living on the shores of the Crimean Sea. The second English-language appearance from the celebrated Russian geneticist-turned-novelist (The Funeral Party, 2001).
Although it weighs in at just over 300 pages, the story has a Tolstoyan heft to it, not only in its seriousness but in the dizzying array of characters who wander in and out. The heart of the tale is Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, now (in the 1970s) a widow of more than 20 years. Born in the 1890s to a Greek family that had settled many generations earlier in a Crimean village, Medea was a freethinking young woman who became enamored of Communism long before the 1917 revolution. Her late husband Samuel Mendez, a Jew who became one of the first Party members in Russia, was an officer in a special detachment of the Red Army. Although he left Medea childless, she had a large extended family and many friends, and her house on the Crimean is always crowded now with visitors during the summer holiday season. There is Medea’s childhood playmate Elena, who married Medea’s brother: She came from a wealthy Armenian family, and her father supported Medea and her 12 brothers and sisters after both of their parents died young. Elena’s son Georgii is also a summer visitor. Then there is Medea’s younger sister Alexandra, who married Ivan Isaevich and had a daughter they named Nike, a great favorite of Medea’s. Nike is inseparable from her childhood friend Masha, who grew up to marry Valerii Butonov, a famous athlete and circus performer who became a physician. This is a story of recollection, unfolding backwards as the arrival of Medea’s guests recalls events long past but far from forgotten.
As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of an age—striking, but badly out of focus.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-8052-4196-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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