A staggeringly powerful story of inhumanity and one man’s unrelenting will to survive.
An innocent Syrian student is sent to a brutal prison.
From 1982 to 1994, author Khalifa spent 12 years in Tadmur, a prison located in the desert northeast of Damascus, one of the worst in the Middle East. He barely survived. Originally published in Arabic in 2006, this autobiographical novel written in diary form is about that harrowing experience. It’s excruciatingly painful to read. The narration is told in a purposefully flat, restrained prose style superbly rendered by translator Starkey. After graduating from college in Paris, Musa returns home to Syria. At the airport, he is taken away by two security guards. No reason is given, but we later learn it had to do with another student’s remarks about something critical Musa had once said about the Syrian regime. For this he will spend years in a hell on Earth. The torture begins right away. Guards, believing him to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood when he’s actually a Christian, stuff him into a car tire, exposing his bare feet and legs, and ruthlessly whip him until the skin comes off and exposes bone. “Overcome with despair and fear of an unknown fate,” he’s taken to Tadmur to join thousands of other prisoners. He’s stuffed into a 25 square meter “dormitory” with 86 others, where they spend most of their time on the floor, pressed against each others’ bodies. They are continually beaten by the guards, humiliated, and degraded; some are simply taken out to the yard and brutally executed. To maintain his sanity, “like a tortoise,” Musa retreats into his shell, where he will write his diary over and over in his mind, memorizing everything. One young man had “memorized more than thirty thousand names”—name, home, date admitted, and fate—so none would be forgotten.
A staggeringly powerful story of inhumanity and one man’s unrelenting will to survive.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56656-022-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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