No one will miss the message here, but Djaout has also given us a story as steeped in the beauty of North Africa as in the...
The first English translation of this 1991 winner of the French Prix Mediterranée, whose author was assassinated in 1993 by Islamic extremists in Algeria, follows publication of Djaout’s remarkable The Last Summer of Reason (2001) and further shows the loss literature has sustained.
Djaout’s claustrophobic, at times Kafkaesque tale begins with the aging Menouar, a simple former shepherd and veteran of the Algerian resistance, coping with the summer heat in a suburb of the coastal city where he now lives. A busybody, he has noticed lights at night in a house he’d believed to be empty; these turn out to be evidence of the labor of Mahfoudh, an inventor from the city using the house as a quiet studio for finishing his work on a revolutionary loom design. When Mahfoudh tries to apply for a patent at the town office, he encounters such hostility from the bureaucrats, who have never dealt with a patent application before, that he decides to pursue matters back in the city. There, he encounters further resistance when he applies for a passport to attend an inventor’s fair in Germany, attracting police suspicion because he had once been arrested—a decade before, at a student demonstration. Meanwhile, his studio has come under surveillance by a vigilante veterans’ group that includes Menouar. For an inscrutable reason, however, Mahfoudh receives his passport, and, when he travels to the fair, a prize for his invention. Although he has to endure an almost surreal set of hurdles just to get his loom model back into Algeria, he is proclaimed a local and national hero—though his turnabout has lethal consequences for the unsuspecting Menouar.
No one will miss the message here, but Djaout has also given us a story as steeped in the beauty of North Africa as in the darkness threatening those who call it home.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-886913-54-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ruminator Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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