An ambitious look at a serious subject that promises much but, disappointingly, delivers little.
A first novel, Africa- and California-set, fails to engage as it tackles big themes—genocide, cultural difference, wartime love—in an affair between a Tutsi and an American activist.
At its heart, it’s a story that should bring out the hankies, as well as provoke serious thinking about the heavy hand of the past, revenge, and loyalty, but instead its narrative power is lost in often repetitive descriptions—no sunset or sexual encounter going unremarked. The protagonists, further, seem under-realized, especially the narrator, Anne, who for a seasoned activist is extraordinarily naïve. A Californian in her mid-30s, she has gone to Burundi to be an AIDS educator. It’s the early 1990s, and in the capital, Bujumbura (where the author lived from 1991–93), democratic government seems possible after years of postcolonial turmoil. When Anne, burned out by her AIDS work, joins Free Africa, an organization promoting democracy, she meets elegant and charismatic Jean-Pierre, a high-level Tutsi official. The two soon become lovers, and there is even talk of marriage. But Burundi’s long history of violence between the dominant Tutsis and the smaller Hutus, who traditionally have been treated as servants, comes to a head in 1993 as civil war breaks out. Amid brutal killings that are in fact genocide, women and children are deliberately not spared—and a horrified Anne realizes that Jean-Pierre is also participating in the mayhem. Though soon evacuated back to the US, she naively hopes that away from Burundi and its pressures, her love will endure. At Christmas, a somber Jean -Pierre comes to visit in California, where, haunted by images of violence and death, as well as by conflicting loyalties, the two try to reconnect.
An ambitious look at a serious subject that promises much but, disappointingly, delivers little.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50301-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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