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
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.
Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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