A tale not yet complete.
Poet Bellows edges into literary fiction with a first novel about two young adults trying to grow up.
Narrator Warren, 18, and his sister Joan, 20, have been orphaned by cancer and suicide. Early on, they and Auntie E visit the graveyard where their parents are buried. “A bald saint looks up into the trees with extended arms and upturned hands; as we pass by, his expression seems to change from beseeching to bawling.” The story heads in that direction too. Our sibs spend a lot of time thinking about the past: “We’ve had contests to see who could remember what, when. We’ve recreated entire holiday gatherings, down to people’s outfits and food.” Appropriately, much of the story occurs in flashbacks of Dad disintegrating at the hospital, or Mom getting sloshed on the porch. Present time includes Warren and Joan doing things like watching trick-or-treaters enjoy the childhood that was denied them and a subplot about a somewhat evil man named Richard who wants to sell off the family nursery, reducing an entire episode in their lives to a dollar amount. Bellows’s overly simplistic prose, perhaps intended to accurately render the adolescent narrator, comes off more as a limitation than a characterization. Narrative style ranges from dreamy reminiscence to apparent journal entries to Ping-Pongy exchanges between Warren and Joan, who still haven’t matured and might not. Thoughts are often simplistic as well (“I saw it was not my father; it was a replica lying in his bed”), the writing sometimes descends to a level more appropriate to magazine writing, and the only question the book seems to ask is whether Joan and Warren and Auntie E will be able to craft some form of nontraditional family in the aftermath of cruel nature. Still, a nice mood pervades the flashbacks, even if the present suffers for it—which may be the point.
A tale not yet complete.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-051211-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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