THE BOOK OF MEMORY

Name: THE BOOK OF MEMORY
Author: Petina Gappah
ISBN: 978-0-86547-907-4

by Petina Gappah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

Gappah’s elaborate tale is intricately plotted, but her determination to build suspense ultimately saps the narrative of...

bookshelf

An albino woman in Zimbabwe recounts the unlikely story of how she ended up on death row, in a debut novel from Guardian First Book Award winner Gappah (An Elegy for Easterly: Stories, 2009).

Two years after Memory is convicted of murder, she records her life story for an American journalist in hopes it will help win her an appeal. At the age of 9, she writes, her parents sold her to Lloyd Hendricks, a white university professor who lives in tony Umwinsidale, far from the crowded township of Memory’s youth. At Lloyd’s, Memory devours books, rides horses, and, after a dermatologist helps heal her blistered skin, becomes “just another girl.” But almost two decades after they first meet, Lloyd ends up dead in his swimming pool and Memory is imprisoned, left to sort out how it all transpired. The scope here is ambitious. Gappah takes readers across racial and economic lines and sets Memory’s complex upbringing against 30 years of Zimbabwean history. Her protagonist is equally complicated: erudite, unreliable, winningly mordant (she jokes that there’s so much oil in the prison food “you almost fear that America will invade”). But Memory’s a coy narrator, too, withholding information even after circumstances would indicate she’d reveal it. “Then Zenzo entered our lives, and everything wilted,” ends a typical chapter, but who Zenzo is and how he relates to Memory’s incarceration isn’t explained until many pages later. This is especially confounding given the nature of her mission: if Memory’s goal is to offer a sympathetic portrait to a journalist, why be deliberately mysterious? By novel’s end, most questions are answered, but readers may feel frustrated at the Byzantine path they traveled to get there.

Gappah’s elaborate tale is intricately plotted, but her determination to build suspense ultimately saps the narrative of some much-needed momentum.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-86547-907-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OUT OF DARKNESS, SHINING LIGHT
by Petina Gappah

- BOOK REVIEW
AN ELEGY FOR EASTERLY
by Petina Gappah

- PERSPECTIVES
Foreign Influence

bookshelf

ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.