The unending conflict between Faith and Reason is given intriguing fictional form in this uneven yet fascinating symbolic allegory by Egypt's 1988 Nobel Prize winner. Though it was originally serialized there in 1959, Mahfouz's deeply provocative novel never did appear in book form in his native country (a slightly expurgated version was brought out in Lebanon in 1967, and a previous English translation, under the title Children of Gebelaawi, was published in the US in 1981 by Three Continents Press). It's the story of the sons, descendants, and other rivals and successors of Gabalawi, a mysterious patriarch who rules over an alley in a motley neighborhood located somewhere between urban Cairo and a threatening nearby desert. Gabalawi, whose great wealth and sovereign power are reputedly ill-gotten, rules tyrannically over "his" people and especially over his five sons. When the management of Gabalawi's estate is entrusted to his youngest son Adham, and the latter is tempted, first by his disgraced older brother and then by his beautiful wife, to pursue secrets deliberately withheld from him, this Adam and his Eve are cast out from their paradisiacally favored status—and the novel's meanings begin to emerge. In the second of five sequential and related episodes, another Moses (Gabal) brings prosperity to a chosen few. Following him, the Christ-like Rifaa preaches scorn for material wealth—but nevertheless becomes the victim of the jealous stewards of Gabalawi's estate. A more militant popular leader, Qassem, reenacts the history of the prophet Mohammed. And, in the cryptic final sequence, the "magician" Arafa, whose arts and sciences are meant to rescue the alley's poor from servitude, becomes the pawn of local ruling authorities, with predictably ruinous results. Gabalawi's arbitrary power remains forever unbroken. Despite its frequent discursiveness, a rich, ambitious, and absorbing (though deeply pessimistic) work: further proof, if any were needed, that Mahfouz's magnificent storytelling powers are wedded to a daring and discerning criticism of life that places him among the greatest of 20th-century novelists.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-42094-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...
Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.
At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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