A fine mess.
Balkan attitudes and American possibilities mingle successfully in a first novel picked from the slush pile.
Danilo Lazich was the death of his mother. Outsized at birth, the baby quickly outgrows the feeble control of his cobbler father and abandons the shoddy civilization of his Bosnian Serb birthplace for an outlaw life in the hills where, known to his superstitious neighbors as Vuk Hajduk, the wolf, terrorizing travelers and living off the land, he grows to enormous size and, most interestingly, enormous intellect and curiosity. Besting the police and the militia at every encounter, Lazich works his way to Vienna to become, briefly, bodyguard to the Empress Elizabeth, one of many superb character sketches Pavelich throws into this pleasingly undisciplined book. A return to the Balkan provinces results in marriage to Stoja, the incarnation of shrewd, hard-working, unforgiving, bad-tempered, passionate Slavic womanhood. The unloving couple flee to America, landing in New Orleans and hiking to Baton Rouge, where they catch a train for Butte, Montana. There, thousands of their compatriots and other immigrants work the richest lode of copper in a country busy wiring itself from coast to coast. Now known as Dan Savage, Lazich decides that digging is for suckers, but finds plenty of work as an enforcer until he gets the hang of the business and engineering ends of mining, and eventually moves his family to Wyoming, where huge amounts of coal lie waiting for the railroads. Angelene, the only child of the Savage marriage, presents Dan with an American grandchild Rade—Red—who will be truly New World, and Savage’s true companion in his old age. Pavelich starts and abandons a score of novels as he traces Savage’s life. Stoja, for example, plays the stock market successfully, but where the fortune goes is the reader’s guess. As is Angelene’s fate. Readers who can cope with the chaos will be rewarded with a very canny look at the process of Americanization.
A fine mess.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-023-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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