It takes chutzpah for a nonblack to write something like this, but some risks are worth the effort for what they reveal of...
An oddity, this story of New York street-smart black life by columnist and Bible studies instructor Goldblatt (Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY) is actually both hip and moving.
Africa Ali, known to his high-school teacher dad as Kevin, is a bright guy and small-time dealer, 23, full of himself, black pride, and the “dawgs” in the 149th Street Crew he calls his family. He’s got no fear about being interviewed by some whitey who wants to “keep it real,” so into the tape recorder Africa talks, nonstop, about his main man Herc, who keeps his attitude alive and enhances his police record, about his dad, whom he doesn’t talk to anymore, about Tanya, the mother of his child, who kicked him out of her life in the birthing room when he couldn’t say he loved her, about Keisha, who loves him enough to fight for him but from whom he keeps distant, lest she engage his feelings. Africa talks about black superiority, about his own racist and sexist views, about his time in court, about his time in bed with Keisha. He raps, rants, struts, falters—and steadfastly refuses to discuss his older brother Dexter. As the series of interviews proceeds, Africa occasionally delegates others from his crew to speak for him: Keisha tells about how Africa saved her from having zero self-esteem after she tried to help a girlfriend whose child was murdered by its father; intellectual Jerome delivers the Black Power message but also spills the beans about what happened to Dexter; Fast Eddy reports on Africa’s recovery from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And Africa himself struggles to describe his relationship with a Chinese girl. For all his protests, it might just be love.
It takes chutzpah for a nonblack to write something like this, but some risks are worth the effort for what they reveal of essential humanity. This is one.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57962-037-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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