Not for the squeamish. Readers will either embrace the complexity of the writing or become maddeningly lost as the author...
A debut novel about coming-of-age in the Israeli army.
Drawing on her two years of experience in the army, Boianjiu tells a story that centers on the lives of several small-town friends who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces, in which women are required by law to serve. The girls, Yael, Avishag and Lea, are alike and different at the same time. Although they share a common background as schoolgirls living in a country where violence is an everyday component of life, they are also young women, exploring their sexuality while sorting through feelings about their world. Yael becomes a weapons instructor, shooting grenades at wrecked cars in order to pass the time and teaching an errant solider how to hit a target. Lea enters the service of the military police, dons the hated blue beret and feels miserable as a checkpoint crossing guard. The third of the friends, Avishag, marks her entry into the service by excelling at the gas mask test that recruits are required to pass, while slowly allowing the troubled history of the family’s women to overtake her present and affect both her mind and relationships. Other characters pass through the book, touching the girls’ lives and challenging their thinking, but war and violence, death and killing, define both their time in service and their civilian lives. Boianjiu’s prose is coarse, raw and altogether befitting her subject. Hard to read in places, the novel veers back and forth between the present and the past, describing ugly lives filled with emotional detachment from violence, casual sex that seems almost conquering in nature, and complicated, disturbing relationships with families, other soldiers and the people these women protect and serve.
Not for the squeamish. Readers will either embrace the complexity of the writing or become maddeningly lost as the author meanders through a hot, dry country devoid of tenderness.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95595-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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