A graceful meditation on history and nature by an author well worth knowing.
Lyrical novel of the ancient Mediterranean by Croatian writer Perišić.
Three principal characters move Perišić’s loping tale. The first is Miu, a cat, which, like all cats, “does not know the difference between a palace and a neglected yard.” The second is young Kalia, a son of Sparta’s sole colony, who, in another colony, finds himself enslaved. The third is a persistent wind, which explains, “I’m not an ordinary spirit, the way people imagine—a person’s ghost or some such thing—but I am from a family of wind spirits, dragged from the upper parts of the atmosphere by some dramatic events.” Floating back and forth among contending Carthaginians and Syracusans, the wind comments on the ways of the world even as humans, with all their vain wishes, find new ways to invite the gods’ wrath. The obnoxious child of Kalia’s owner tries to torture Miu, ordering Kalia to perform the most savage of acts, bellowing, “I am her master and she needs to love me. She needs to hate you!” It doesn’t work on animals, animal behavior being one of the wind’s chief topics. It certainly doesn’t work on Kalia, who rebels, stealing away to yet another colony far up the neck of the Adriatic Sea in what is reputed to be “the end of the world,” a place called Liburnia, modern Croatia. Perišić takes his time in pulling the threads of the story together, and in any event that story is less memorable than the delightful apothegms with which he adorns his prose. The wind always has the best lines—including, thousands of years after Kalia’s time, while looking down at an alley cat that may well be a descendant of Miu’s, a wistful reminder that she (our wind is a female) needs to find balance lest she go crazy pondering the ways of humans: “That would not be good for the climate. Everything is quite wobbly already.”
A graceful meditation on history and nature by an author well worth knowing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-9-53351-399-7
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Sandorf Passage
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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