Clumsy as rallying cries go but otherwise a graceful vision of a slower, more emotionally in-touch way of life.
A writer ponders the sustainability of both her relationships and the environment in this autobiographical novel-in-diary-entries.
The narrator of this novel by an Icelandic poet and occasional Björk collaborator is dating an ornithologist, nicknamed Birdy, and is close to her brother, an archaeologist named Owlie. Convenient gigs, given that her chief concerns in this book are love, nature, and history, which she explores during her hiking and camping trips through Iceland as well as during brief detours to England and France. She goes bird-watching on a beach; ponders settling down and having kids in Reykjavik; visits ancient settlements, gravesites, and museums; explores the profundity of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics; and generally contemplates the meaning of home. (“A place of experimentation and discovery...where the most natural in each individual can be developed.”) At her best, these ramblings suggest a modern-day Walden, in which a writer communes with the environment to better contemplate the complexities of being. She quotes other writers often (including Thoreau): visiting William Wordsworth’s home, for instance, she’s moved to ask, “Why not renew Romanticism, re-clarify the relationship between creation and memory?” Left to her own devices, though, her musings sometimes drift into freshman-dorm–ish philosophizing. (“No, not back to nature, but forward! Forward to nature!” “I think that farmers should be psychoanalyzed, and rethink their connections with the earth and masculinity.”) Yet there’s something admirably consistent about her vision of stewardship—of life, of relationships, of land—that makes her political naiveté forgivable. When she writes about the charm and beauty of the places she visits, you want to pitch a tent right alongside her.
Clumsy as rallying cries go but otherwise a graceful vision of a slower, more emotionally in-touch way of life.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 9781632060747
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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