Intelligent, fun, sad, insightful—an exceptional work.
This is a smart, entertaining sprawl of a book that dissects, chides, and pays homage to the European Union.
A prologue flags the busy narrative that lies ahead: As a pig runs loose on the streets of Brussels, five of the main characters are introduced, tied to a trade dispute, a pan-European project, and a murder that is possibly linked to NATO and the Vatican. Pig references abound, revealing both the complexities of trade deals and the author’s impish side. Menasse (Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits: Or Why the Democracy Given to Us Must Become One We Fight For, 2016, etc.), an Austrian who won Germany’s top literary prize for this novel, has many threads to weave. Like Musil in The Man Without Qualities, he has fun with efforts to organize something grand to celebrate an anniversary, here the 50th of the European Commission’s founding (he even parodies that book’s opening passage). The narrative mosaic’s main tiles concern the commission’s bureaucratic circus, its subtle and petty power games. Menasse conveys a broad range of the human comedy with brisk, sometimes-mordant prose—and the guidance of a fine translator. Here are two bureaucrats in their first tryst: “He faked desire for her; she faked an orgasm. The chemistry was right.” Through it all is the steady message that more unites the people of the European Union than divides them. The narrative reinforces this with personal histories that cross borders and intersect. There are also two disparate characters following different paths to a similar vision of “the commonality of Europeans,” born, like the commission itself, from a hope to never again let nationalist madness become Holocaust. Each makes unsettling use of Auschwitz, however, and some speechifying that turns a message of story-borne subtlety into neon glare. These are rare missteps in this ambitious panorama that arrives amid the throes of Brexit and the Chinese Year of the Pig.
Intelligent, fun, sad, insightful—an exceptional work.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-571-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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