by Patrice Nganang ; translated by Amy Baram Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016
An elegantly drawn and engaging world of a sort unknown to most readers—but one they’ll be glad to have visited.
Cameroonian writer Nganang delivers a modern epic, tinged with liberal doses of magical realism, of life in his country’s colonial era.
Mount Pleasant, in the highlands of Yaoundé, is a story-swathed place where the magical and inexplicable can happen. It is the residence in exile, the Palace of All Dreams, of the learned Sultan Njoya, who has just traded one colonial master for another. “I’m like a woman, and the whites are like men,” Njoya laments. “What can I do except obey?” That note of gender shifting is important, for when 9-year-old Sara enters the Sultan’s harem, its sharp-tongued supervisor, Bertha, inexplicably sees in the young girl an incarnation of her late son, Nebu, and immediately reclassifies her as a boy, something that seems to cause no stir even as Sara is increasingly remade into the lost boy: “Yes,” Bertha thinks, “it was up to her to coat this child’s lips with words of love that would replace Nebu’s tragic story.” Getting to that “tragic story” draws the reader into many other stories, funny and sad and improbable, even as we puzzle out why Bertha should be searching for her dead son in the bodies of young girls. In the end, Nganang offers a fine celebration of storytelling along with a thinly veiled critique of colonialism. Under the best of circumstances, Nganang’s story is not easy to follow; it summons a wealth of African history and cultural allusion that most readers will not have. Still, as with García Márquez, the trick is to suspend disbelief and then some and let the narrative sweep away any scruples. Therein lies depth of observation and precise description: recalls Sara, “She’d hear the syllables of her name ricochet off Yaoundé’s seven hills and then roll through the mud of the valley before they were lost in the heart of the rain, in the joyous laughter of the girls her age.”
An elegantly drawn and engaging world of a sort unknown to most readers—but one they’ll be glad to have visited.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-21385-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
by Patrice Nganang ; translated by Amy B. Reid
BOOK REVIEW
by Patrice Nganang ; translated by Amy B. Reid
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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