An aesthetically pleasing but perplexing experiment that may prove too improvisational for many readers.
A writer and his friend talk about all manner of things while the world dissolves around them like a Salvador Dali painting.
Argentinean wunderkind Katchadjian is currently in legal trouble in his native country for daring to remix a novel by the late writer Jorge Luis Borges, so it’s an interesting time to introduce him to English readers. This slim, surrealistic novel is utter nonsense, but at least it’s literary gibberish that’s quite fun to read in the right frame of mind. In the opening pages we meet our nameless narrator and his friend, Alberto, who spend their days lecturing about a variety of subjects at an English university. Of course, on the opening page we also see Alberto grab a questioning student and stuff him into his mouth, as one does. The author is clearly playing with literary conventions, but his automatic writing style is jarring as he makes his playful but absurd attempt at capturing the narrative of thought. There’s a lot of this: “Then, we’re suddenly in an English university and we teach. Then we run through a forest. Then we’re in a tavern with eight hundred wine drinkers. Then we’re in a plaza with an old man who is also a pigeon.” Perhaps Katchadjian is trying to say something about the nature of change, as people and places in the novel constantly transmogrify and shift. The novel still has its touchstones—sometimes the narrator and his friend are on a ship trying to reach an island; sometimes they find themselves at war. But mostly they’re endlessly lecturing at an English university before the universe decides to drop them into another strange and different situation. The overall effect falls somewhere between the delicate constructions of Cesar Aira and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
An aesthetically pleasing but perplexing experiment that may prove too improvisational for many readers.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56478-705-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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