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...
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
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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
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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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