by Radwa Ashour & translated by Barbara Romaine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2011
An expansive and heartfelt but overly random novel-cum-historical account.
An esteemed Egyptian novelist and her fictional alter ego look back at the tumultuous past, reflecting on the resilience and deep-seated sorrow of the Palestinian people.
Part novel, part memoir, part historical/political screed and part rumination on the writing process, the book, first published in Arabic in 1999, is a literary juggling act. To start with, it is a first-person novel by and about Radwa, a professor of literature, called Specters. Inside that novel, a history teacher, Shagar, is writing a nonfiction history book, also called Specters. Ashour also intrudes directly to remark on the storytelling process, and the intersections of fiction and reality, past and present. There are enough plot elements, and enough leaps back and forth in time, for an epic film: civil disobedience, imprisonments, hospitalizations, assassinations, suicides, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, love, romance and exile. The focal point for both Radwa and Shagar is a tragic 1948 incident in which dozens of civilians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin were brutally killed by Israeli paramilitary forces. Like other violence perpetrated in the book, it is referred to as a massacre, a judgment with which some but not all historical accounts agree. The sense of loss and mistreatment that permeates the pages is deep, and the author's outrage is frequently justified. But by writing of Israelis and Jews in general with great anger and disgust (Ariel Sharon is described as "the fat man who loved dogs but hated Arabs"), while making no mention of the terrorism inflicted on them by Palestinians for decades, Ashour loses sympathy and credibility. For all the energy and ingenuity that went into the complicated structure, the design achieves little. At various points, the author only confuses the reader as to which character is doing what at a given time.
An expansive and heartfelt but overly random novel-cum-historical account.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56656-832-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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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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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