by Mia Couto ; translated by Eric M.B. Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2019
An impressionistic flash-fiction trek through the wreckage of war.
Stories about life in Mozambique after its civil war, reckoning with the damage via fable and folklore.
This collection by Couto (Woman of the Ashes, 2018, etc.) was first published in Portuguese in 1994, two years after the end of a 15-year war that killed or displaced 6 million people. So the mood is understandably somber, but Couto is not interested in dwelling on carnage; in his introduction, he writes that he wishes to explore instead “the space where violence could not strike, where barbarism could not enter.” That means the stories are more intimate tales of loss or of odd, Borges-ian incidents: A man is concerned that his pregnant wife’s long labor signals she’s cheated; the rain in the title story represents the end of the war years when “the gods reproached us with this drought”; a coconut reportedly spills blood instead of milk; a man turns his heavy drinking into an act of postwar religious meditation. All of the 26 stories are brief, usually running no more than five or six pages. And the plots are brush strokes, usually turning on themes of infidelity and the ways society has been upended after the war, be it through coping mechanisms (drinking and sex, usually) or more peculiar scenarios, as in “Beyond the River Bend,” in which a hippopotamus breaks into a vocational school and contents itself “chewing through a sewing machine.” Stylistically, Couto’s writing is poker-faced, neither rejecting nor outright embracing the more surrealistic events he describes, though he does enjoy wordplay: Translator Becker ably preserves Couto's affinity for neologisms with puns like “timidiminutive,” “mistified nights,” “intirrigated,” “airsfixiated.” Not every coinage works, nor does every story, but the prevailing effect is, to quote one of his portmanteaus, “splendolorous”: conveying a sense of profound loss flecked with a measure of optimism about life after the bloodshed is over.
An impressionistic flash-fiction trek through the wreckage of war.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77196-266-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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by Mia Couto ; translated by David Brookshaw
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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