A brief, intensely focused portrayal of moral and psychological dissolution, by the Prix Goncourtwinning Moroccanborn novelist (With Downcast Eyes, 1993, etc.). Ben Jelloun's protagonist Mourad, a 40-year-old husband and father who lives in Casablanca and works as Deputy Director of Planning at his country's Ministry of Development, narrates in an increasingly agitated present-tense his unhappy experiences as ``a simple, good-natured man stifled by integrity.'' Refusing to cut corners or relax his penny-pinching routines, Mourad initially scorns a pragmatic subordinate's wheel-greasing and bribe-taking, or a supervisor's assurance that such ``flexibility'' actually constitutes ``a parallel economy'' that everyone but Mourad takes for granted. Gradually, however, the pressures of his family's financial need and his greedy wife's contemptuous taunting push Mourad to compromise his principles. The immediate consequences are a self-indulgent ``escapade'' and a romantic fixation on his beautifuland principledwidowed cousin. Unable to resume his former ways, Mourad falls into physical illness and hallucination, and ever so slowly into acceptance of what he persuades himself is the norm. Ben Jelloun's spare, lucid prose concentrates quite effectively on his troubled protagonist's unravelling psyche (though the translation occasionally permits this meticulous straight-arrow to address us in unconvincingly slangy accents). Despite its narrative and thematic simplicity, Corruption aims high. It is prefaced by a heartfelt acknowledgement of and dedication to the embattled Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer (currently under house arrest in Jakarta). And its plot, theme, and setting inevitably recall the ingredients that were mixed to much more potent effect in the novel that seems to have inspired Ben Jelloun's, Camus's classic The Stranger. The story of Mourad's fall from rectitude into compromise isn't exactly the stuff of tragedy. It has a modest cautionary power, but its ``hero'' is in no way exceptionalnor is the working-out of his fate particularly compelling.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-295-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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