MINUTES OF GLORY

Name: MINUTES OF GLORY
Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
ISBN: 978-1-62097-465-0

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019

Of great interest to Ngugi’s many readers as well as students of contemporary African literature and the literature of...

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Early short stories by one of Africa’s most esteemed fiction writers.

Long resident in the United States, where he is now Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Kenya-born Ngugi (Wizard of the Crow, 2006, etc.) began his writing career while still a university student in British-ruled Uganda. The pensive story that opens this collection, “Mugumo,” dates to 1960, describing a woman on the run, going—well, somewhere, anywhere “to get away from the hearth, the courtyard, the huts and the people, away from everything that reminded her of Muhoroini Ridge and its inhabitants.” Her husband has abused her, his other wives are jealous of her, and she is childless, all good reason to flee. But then the rains come, the night fills with ghosts, and she has a life-changing dream that causes her to turn back. To that original story, Ngugi adds two later sections in which a time of rain and flood becomes a time of drought and famine, in which, many years later, the consequences of her choice become clear. Against a backdrop of late British colonialism and the earliest years of independence for Kenya, Ngugi writes of characters whose dreams are too often crushed: A young medical student kills himself after failing an exam, freeing himself from what would appear to have been a curse that renders his intelligence and good looks meaningless; a stern white woman, “having no opinions of her own about anything,” concludes that the Africans around her are "inscrutable,” rationalizing homicide; a churchgoer becomes a church elder and a respected leader only to be thwarted at the altar. Though these stories lack the psychological depth of Ngugi’s later work, they point toward it as well as giving a valuable literary view of African lives in a pivotal, turbulent era.

Of great interest to Ngugi’s many readers as well as students of contemporary African literature and the literature of colonialism and post-colonialism.

Pub Date: March 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-62097-465-0

Page Count: 208

Publisher: The New Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WRESTLING WITH THE DEVIL
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

- BOOK REVIEW
BIRTH OF A DREAM WEAVER
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE HOUSE OF THE INTERPRETER
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

- IN THE NEWS
Ngugi wa Thiong’o Dies at 87

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Awards & Accolades

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Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

21

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK OF LIVES
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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.