Atta writes lyrically and eloquently about ordinary life.
Atta (Everything Good Will Come, 2007) focuses on two women fighting against sexual harassment and trying to make a meaningful life in Nigeria.
Rose and Tolani (the novel’s narrator) share both a friendship and a workplace—a bank in Lagos—but at the beginning of the novel, Rose is sacked for refusing the advances of the repulsive Mr. Salako, a senior manager. While Rose is somewhat relieved to be out of an awkward situation, she’s mortified when Tolani is named to her position—and Tolani also finds herself harassed by the relentless Salako. Rose is fundamentally unhappy being Nigerian and instead wishes “she had been born in Czechoslovakia because the name sounded sophisticated.” Besides Salako, Tolani has problems with her lover Sanwo, who can’t quite commit either to a job or to her. She wants to give him an ultimatum that she hopes will result in marriage, but she’s fearful of the possible consequences because she finds it hard to imagine her life without him. Meanwhile, the increasingly desperate Rose takes up with OC, recently returned from a successful yet mysterious business deal in America. OC’s sleaziness makes Tolani uneasy, and her friendship with Rose—like her relationship with Sanwo—begins to falter. Tolani’s intuitions about OC turn out to be correct, for he’s a drug dealer who wants to use them both as mules to transport heroin in condoms to the States. Neither Rose nor Tolani can quite get the hang of swallowing the undigestible packages, and Tolani eventually decides on moral grounds that she doesn’t want to be exploited in this way. In increasingly distressed financial condition, Rose winds up being OC’s drug courier but dies when the package “explodes” inside her. By the end of the narrative, Tolani, who comes from a small Yoruba village, decides that life in Lagos is too wretched and corrupt, so she returns home to her mother, looking to start afresh—and include Sanwo in her future.
Atta writes lyrically and eloquently about ordinary life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56656-833-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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