by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 29, 2019
A multilayered, twisting, and surprising whirlwind of a novel that is as impressive as it is heartbreaking.
Life under Robert Mugabe’s brutal government takes center stage in this harrowing novel of Zimbabwe.
Seventeen-year-old Bukhosi Mlambo has been missing for more than a week, since his disappearance during a political rally. His parents, Abednego and Mama Agnes, desperate to find him, have accepted the emotional support and help of their tenant, Zamani, the unreliable narrator through whom the story is told. Zamani, an orphan, feeling a “prick of opportunity,” takes advantage of their desperation and endeavors to replace Bukhosi and go from “surrogate son” to “son” through a variety of manipulative acts. As Zamani, who seems to live by the philosophy "that it’s not what's true that matters, but what you can make true,” unscrupulously attempts to cultivate an intimacy with the Mlambos, what results is a novel of confessions—some given freely, others pried through alcohol, drugs, and other means—family secrets, and an unflinching portrait of life in Zimbabwe before, during, and immediately after the Rhodesian Bush War. The wrath of the military commander dubbed Black Jesus, the Gukurahundi massacres—Tshuma’s (Shadows, 2012) sprawling debut novel delves into these atrocities and others, and that history at times overwhelms the motivations and interiority of the central characters. Nonetheless, Tshuma delineates a rich and complicated tale about the importance of history (“Always, you must be looking back over your shoulder, to see what history is busy plotting for your future”), the price of revolution, the pursuit of freedom, and the remaking of one’s self.
A multilayered, twisting, and surprising whirlwind of a novel that is as impressive as it is heartbreaking.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63542-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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