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
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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