One of the finest coming-of-age tales of recent years, and a splendid novelistic debut by a writer who seems to be just now...
The ghosts of Jack London, Thomas Wolfe, and Jack Kerouac all hover approvingly over a terrific first novel by Heighton, an Ontario poet and storywriter (Flight Paths of the Emperor, not yet published in the US, etc.).
There’s even a chapter entitled “Look Homeward, Angel” in this chronicle of the early life and education of Sevigne Torrins, a hopeful writer who grows up in Ontario’s Sault Sainte Marie on the shores of Lake Superior. In beautiful long, looping rhapsodic sentences studded with vigorous images, Heighton begins his tale with a lengthy account of Sevigne’s conflicted relationship with his father Sam, a ship’s cook, devout alcoholic, and effusive autodidact whose habit of mangled quotation from favorite books and authors stimulates and irritates the fledgling poet whom he’s affectionately (if casually) nurturing. Though Sam is a great character, Sevigne’s mother Martine, a vibrant beauty whose love-hate relationship with Sam ends in her departure to live in Cairo with a career diplomat, is less fully realized. In general Heighton does much better with male characters, especially as the story’s focus broadens to depict Sevigne’s undistinguished career as an amateur boxer, his brief trip to Egypt to re-bond with Martine and his older brother Bryon, and his entry into Toronto’s literary subculture, where he begins publishing work and builds relationships with a tough-minded poet (Una), the troubled singer (Mikaela, a.k.a. “Ike”) whom he almost marries, and—most interestingly—moody, mercurial fellow writer Ray, who plays Neal Cassaday to Sevigne’s Jack Kerouac. The climax comes with Sevigne’s retreat to live alone in a lighthouse on remote Rye island in northern Lake Superior: a tour-de-force account of loneliness, privation, and suffering that calls to mind London’s classic story of man-vs.-nature “To Build a Fire.”
One of the finest coming-of-age tales of recent years, and a splendid novelistic debut by a writer who seems to be just now entering a most impressive maturity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-13933-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
In her depictions of her characters and their worlds—both internal and external—Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.
A series of deaths mystifies a small Polish village.
When her neighbor Big Foot turns up dead one night, Janina Duszejko and another neighbor, Oddball, rush to his house to lay out the body and properly dress him. They’re having trouble getting hold of the police, and, as Oddball points out, “He’ll be stiff as a board before they get here.” Janina and Oddball—and Big Foot, up till now—live in an out-of-the-way Polish village on the Czech border. It’s rural, and remote, and most of the other inhabitants are part-time city-dwellers who only show up in the summer, when the weather is more temperate. Janina narrates Tokarczuk’s (Flights, 2018) latest creation to appear in English. But she wouldn’t like to hear herself referred to by that name, which she thinks is “scandalously wrong and unfair.” In fact, she explains, “I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person”—hence “Oddball” and “Big Foot.” Janina spends much of her time studying astrology and, on Fridays, translating passages of Blake with former pupil Dizzy, who comes to visit. But after Big Foot dies, other bodies start turning up, and Janina and her neighbors are drawn further and further into the mystery of their deaths. Some of the newly dead were involved in illegal activities, but Janina is convinced that “Animals” (she favors a Blakean style of capitalization) are responsible. Tokarczuk’s novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable—and just right. Tokarczuk’s mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything. Like the prizewinning Flights, this novel resists the easy conventions of the contemporary work of fiction.
In her depictions of her characters and their worlds—both internal and external—Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-54133-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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