HE SLEEPS

Name: HE SLEEPS
Author: Reginald McKnight
ISBN: 0-8050-4828-6

by Reginald McKnight ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2001

An ambitious expansion upon two earlier Senegalese stories (White Boys, 1998, etc.). Its intrigue and themes might have paid...

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A compact, multivoiced novel set in Senegal, 1985, concerning an American black man’s exploration of his sexual and racial identity.

Bertrand Milworth, a 30ish anthropologist, is in Senegal gathering African “UL’s”—urban legends. He shares a home with a Senegalese family consisting of Alaine, his wife Kene, and their young daughter. Bert, whose first language is English, and the Senegalese family, whose first language is Wolof, communicate primarily in stilted French and English. This makes meanings approximate or blurry, and the cognitive blur affects Bert’s vision of everything going on around him in the small village. His dreaming, recorded in abundant (and often unnecessary) detail, is clearer—despite or perhaps because of its symbolic nature: Meanwhile, Bert is sexually attracted to Kene. Through the use of letters to and from home, transcripts of telephone conversations, journal entries, dream records, and first-, second-, and third-person narration, the reader learns that Bert is in a troubled marriage—and this research project isn’t helping. His wife Rose, a white woman with whom Bert has never lived, remains behind in Colorado with a painful insight into Bert’s real reasons for traveling to Senegal. Bert has never had sexual relations with a black woman. Nor, we learn, has he ever had dreams, at least dreams he could remember, but in Senegal his dream life is so rich that it impinges on his waking. What has he imagined, and what has actually happened? He begins to suspect Alaine of working magic against him, Kene of seducing him—at least in his dreams, and his guide Idrissa of deceiving him. A quest for palm wine, a passage that recalls the sickening menace of Paul Bowles’s North African stories, leads Bert into precincts that tweak his growing paranoia.

An ambitious expansion upon two earlier Senegalese stories (White Boys, 1998, etc.). Its intrigue and themes might have paid off more fully with a less splintered narrative approach.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2001

ISBN: 0-8050-4828-6

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | PARANORMAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WHITE BOYS
by Reginald McKnight

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THE KIND OF LIGHT THAT SHINES ON TEXAS
by Reginald McKnight

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

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

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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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.