A remarkably evocative portrayal of the usually ignored white underclass: the best post-apartheid novel yet.
A distinguished new voice from South Africa writes about a white working-class Afrikaner family with a shameful secret as the end of Apartheid draws near.
Poor, ill-educated, and dependent on government handouts, the Benade family moved in to Johannesburg in the 1930s, when drought and the Depression ended their farming. Recruited to do the grunt work of policing apartheid and manning the railroads, they were rewarded with housing and a protected white status. But the Benades—Pop, Mol, Treppie, and young Lambert—who live in Triomf, built on the rubble of the legendary Sophiatown, are, by 1993 and story’s opening, cynical about politics. They also fear black rule, and, as they prepare for Lambert’s 40th birthday, the same month as the upcoming election that will end Apartheid, they make half-hearted preparations to flee north. But the family is so dysfunctional and volatile that most of their enterprises end badly. Treppie, scarred by a childhood beating, provokes quarrels; Pop is well-meaning but ailing; Mol is worn out from sexually servicing all three men; and Lambert, an epileptic, is mentally ill. The three older Benades are in fact siblings with a secret: Lambert is their son. No one is sure who the father is—the incest began in childhood, and Lambert has been told that Pop and Mol are his parents. In 1994, as election and birthday near, they comment mordantly on the politicians, and Lambert, who’s been promised a woman, makes a list of things to do—including an attempt to clean the kitchen, which ends in an explosion. Nothing ever goes right, yet a redemptive affection allows the Benades to survive death, revelations, even the establishment of a black government.
A remarkably evocative portrayal of the usually ignored white underclass: the best post-apartheid novel yet.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-500-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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