Told in beautifully evocative prose, a panoramic novel showing that the price of growing beyond one’s origins might be...
Nigerian writer Ehirim's audacious debut novel follows a teenager's quest for self-definition in a country in search of itself.
In a prologue set in 1992, the narrator, Ihechi, and his friends run into the famed Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who proceeds to get the foursome—which includes Mendaus, a pretentious bookworm; his stepsister, Zeenat, who doubles as Ihechi’s love interest; and a young Christian known only as Pastor’s son—drunk to the point of threatening a police officer. Ehirim then moves back to 1985 as he retraces the steps leading up to that fateful event, which encapsulates the generational and class intersections propelling the novel. Most of the adults here are fixed in their worldviews. Their children, too young to understand the circumstances that have led their parents to be so rigid, socialize with one another though they come from different backgrounds and differentiate themselves through pop culture. Zeenat communicates through movies, Pastor’s son through Scripture, and Mendaus through books. Ihechi, however, is constantly seeking meaning and remains distant due to his banker father’s business relationship with the government and his mother’s religious fanaticism. These poles gesture toward what Ihechi sees as the underpinnings of Nigerian society: corruption and traditionalism. Fela, a musician who encouraged traditional African lifestyles and religions while being arrested hundreds of times for criticizing the Nigerian government, develops into the perfect centerpiece to represent both the cross-cultural appeal of music and Ihechi’s emotional confusion as a child. The next time the foursome sees Fela, a military crackdown leaves Zeenat dead; Mendaus radicalized; and Ihechi’s mother fearful for her son’s impressionable spirit. She sends him away to live with his uncle and cousins, Pentecostals who look down on him—though it turns out that Ihechi’s cousin Tessy is sneaking out at night to work in a brothel. Through her connections, Ihechi winds up working for a major general in Nigeria’s army, setting the stage for a confrontation with his childhood friends that forces him to reckon with what both he and his country have become.
Told in beautifully evocative prose, a panoramic novel showing that the price of growing beyond one’s origins might be steeper than anticipated.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-167-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
