Rich material in need of a firmer authorial hand.
A young Somali racks up lots of miles in this combination coming-of-age/adventure story, the author’s debut, set in the Horn of Africa in the 1930s.
Can a snake bring good luck? Ambaro thought so. When the teenage Somali was pregnant, a black mamba nestled over her belly. This happened in Hargeisa, her ancestral home (it’s also the author’s birthplace). Her son Jama was born without complications, but the good luck failed to materialize. Her husband Guure, an impractical dreamer, left them to find work in Sudan. The novel opens in Aden, in Arabia, in 1935. Ambaro is working in a coffee factory; Jama is a scrappy 11-year-old, running the streets, until his mother sickens and dies, when relatives ship him back to Hargeisa. Somalis are sustained by a strong network of clans; they are also nomadic. Jama’s family philosophy is to keep moving, and soon enough Jama leaves on a quest for his father. Whether on foot, by lorry, by train or by ship, Jama never stops traveling—first to Djibouti, then Eritrea, and eventually, in the 1940s, to Egypt, Palestine and Europe. East Africa is controlled by the British, French and Italians; Mussolini’s invading army is on the march. In Eritrea, Jama learns his father, a deserter from the Italian army, has been killed. His life has become a roller coaster. His parents’ ghosts twice intervene to save him from death. With one glorious exception, an eccentric intellectual in Djibouti, the author shows little talent for characterization. Jama is a blank slate on which the author writes cultural and colonial history. When his father’s ghost tells him to go to Egypt, he leaves his young Eritrean bride after one night. Later, in Palestine, he realizes he may be on a fool’s errand, another “poster boy of failed migration.” Pulled this way and that, Jama reflects Mohamed’s own indecision, torn between naturalism and magic realism.
Rich material in need of a firmer authorial hand.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-11419-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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