A curious, even eccentric book, and a must-read for fans of post-boom Latin American literature.
Change your handwriting, change your life: an enigmatic 1996 novel, his first to be translated into English, by Uruguayan writer Levrero.
In Latin America, there’s a literary saw that says that Mexico produces novelists, Chile poets, and Uruguay “strange ones.” So notes translator McDermott in her scene-setting introduction to this slender story à clef, in which Levrero recounts trying to make his handwriting more calligraphic and, by improving it, to alter bad habits and become an altogether better person. The problem is the solution: He tries to write “empty words,” words chosen simply for their power to test the musculature of composition, say with lots of instances of the troublesome letter r in them. By not lifting the pen from the page, Levrero writes, “I think this will help me improve my concentration and the continuity of my thoughts, which are currently all over the place.” Write he does, scattered thoughts and all, and amid the humdrum, meaningful compositions begin to emerge, unbidden, tempting the author “to turn my calligraphical prose into narrative prose, with the idea of building a series of texts that, like the steps of a staircase, would carry me back up to those longed-for heights I was once able to reach.“ More than just an exercise in chasing his own tail, Levrero takes himself into dangerous psychological territory, wrestling with the things that underlie his loopy a’s: anxiety builds, he smokes like a chimney, he bloats and becomes listless—and then comes, if not a breakthrough, at least the emergence of some interesting if sometimes unpleasant sketches, marked by second thoughts, strike-throughs, revisions, and other such signs of the alchemy that is writing. Vita contemplativa, vita scripta: What Levrero learns about himself, in the end, is of universal application, and while it’s not necessarily cheerful, it allows him to proceed “by means of a kind of spiritual acrobatics.”
A curious, even eccentric book, and a must-read for fans of post-boom Latin American literature.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-56689-546-0
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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